My life goal was to attend one of these elite universities. I desired to work at companies such as Google or Apple.
After graduating from the Czech Technical University I realized that
1. I am much less special then I thought
2. There is much more hard working focused average people then the few talented superstars, both usually achieving the same
3. Surprisingly many of the exceptionally smart people in my social bubble, some of them graduated from the best universities in the world, "left the system" and focus on doing creative small thing's in their everyday life, instead of pursuing their parents dreams
4. Work, life, and social structure is extremely unfair
5. I will do my best to teach my kinds to strive for understanding, a love for beauty and a complexity of the world, instead of focusing on grades and stuff
6. The two guys I knew, who attended Oxf. and Camb. were both fired because they were more talk then action. Not a representative sample though. Just ruining my illusion.
Regarding 6. sometimes companies, especially start-ups hire those people not for their abilities, but to be able to tell investors they hire top uni educated workforce. They are more for PR than actual work. Sometimes it is frustrating, if they get paid the same as people who actually do work.
Ugh this has become common in Silicon Valley. “We have a brilliant team of engineers who previously worked at FAANGUberAirBnB”…it’s sickening.
So is what the companies say about their board members and their C suite. I guess it could just be a reflection of facts but I fear this will lead to future startups hiring purely on this sort of credentialisms.
There is nothing wrong with using branding as a heuristic. Everyone does it when they prefer buying one brand over another. People do not have enough time or information to make fully informed decisions about each and every thing, including other people.
There is a lot wrong with credentialism. Branding is fine for products. We already have rampant credentialism based on University pedigree and this appears to extend that to careers.
Human labor is a product too, in this context. Credentialing is a consequence of people having to make decisions with limited resources. There is no reality where it will not exist, in some form or another. It existed before Google/Apple/Facebook, and it will exist after as long as it is advantageous to try and filter what you are buying.
Why not accept it (and try to improve it)? It seems futile given the basic fact that it is impossible to have perfect information about the decisions you make. Therefore the options are to make decisions completely randomly, or use some Bayesian probability to try to make better bets.
The assertion here is that the effect of these signals on the chances of success are not very large and in fact the systemic prejudices they create against otherwise qualified pool of candidates, and the pressure they create for people to obtain these (arguably meaningless) credentials has a worse overall effect on the labor pool.
So these signals wouldn’t really help you make better bets, and they have bad side effects, which is why we need to bin them.
> Work, life, and social structure is extremely unfair
It's always going to be unfair. Attempts to fix it always result in some other unfairness.
The real thing that works is freedom, i.e. not having the law artificially holding you back. Instead of being consumed by envy of others, you can make your own life better.
It's typically the story of the prodigal son in the bible : it's unfair that the son that squandered away his inheritance gets back and is celebrated, while the son that was wise and helped his father does not get anything special.
The US raised scores of millions of immigrants from poverty to the middle class. Poor people immigrated to the US, people with nothing but a suitcase. The US has seen the most spectacular rise from poverty to wealth ever seen in history.
In WW1, for example, the German soldiers knew they had lost when the Americans arrived, well equipped, tall, and fat with food. The Japanese soldiers had a similar reaction when facing GIs in WW2.
Of course, with free markets and prosperity, the Germans and Japanese have since caught up.
(In WW2, the US was able to fight two major wars simultaneously, and supply the allies, and move all that stuff overseas. An incredible achievement, only possible from free markets and the wealth produced by them.)
> In WW2, the US was able to fight two major wars simultaneously, and supply the allies, and move all that stuff overseas. An incredible achievement, only possible from free markets and the wealth produced by them.
The US nationalized many industries during WWII.
From 'U.S. not always averse to nationalization, despite its free-market image'[1]
"In times of war and national emergency, Washington has not hesitated. In 1917, the government seized the railroads to make sure goods, armaments and troops moved smoothly in the interests of national defense during World War I. Bondholders and stockholders were compensated, and railroads were returned to private ownership in 1920, after the war ended.
During World War II, Washington seized dozens of companies including railroads, coal mines and, briefly, the Montgomery Ward department store chain."
"the individual most closely involved with this effort, recounts the unique story of Ohly and his compatriots who were charged with the mission of guaranteeing that private companies sustained the vital war production of weapons, munitions, and other materiel needed by America's fighting men and the Allies to achieve victory overseas"
Rather, it was having access to 1) continent-wide natural resources and 2) no combat theatre domestically which would have disrupted manufacturing, warehousing, transportation, not to mention civilian life and morale.
I should point out that the industrial bit of the USSR was the bit the Germans invaded first. The Soviets had to move their entire industrial heartland a thousand or so miles east out of harm's way and rebuild it before they could start producing stuff.
When they did, they produced vast amounts of war material, and possibly would have beaten the Germans single-handedly given another year or two.
Which strongly suggests that the real problem is ideological polemics, which makes sense when you think about it.
The USA didn't stick to ideological capitalism, and implemented many "socialist" policies: welfare systems, public works projects, labour protections, public infrastructure, etc. etc.
The USSR did stick to ideological communism as they defined it. Markets weren't utilized at all. Freedom of thought was suppressed. Political purges were executed.
In the USA, something similar was tried with the "red scare", but thankfully plurality won out, and some of those "abhorrent" socialist policies became mainstays in "great capitalist America" as part of the New Deal, which is what saved the USA from its domestic communist movement.
Over the last few decades though, the USA seems to have forgotten this. Forgotten that what saved the USA was not rigid adherence to some pre-existing quasi-religious ideological/spiritual polemic (which both capitalism and communism are), but the willingness to implement and incorporate a wide basket of ideas as they were appropriate.
Also it's worth noting that the US has a bunch of nationalised/government controlled services that are privatised in the UK and other parts of Europe, including:
- Airports and airport security
- Postal service (USPS)
- Train operators (Amtrak)
- Insurance (FCIC, FEMA)
- Various municipal utilities and the TVA
- Various credit/financial/banking institutions
In the UK, we have privatised airports, mail, energy, telephony, water, train operators (though this is sort of changing), and don't have equivalents for many of the government owned finance organisations that the US has.
Additionally, many of the private industries in the US are far from free market. The UK's private healthcare industry is arguably more free market than the US's private healthcare industry, although has to compete with the NHS.
This isn't a criticism, just to remark that the US certainly isn't afraid of nationalisation and government owned services.
The US indeed has a very unfree health care system, and that is the source of the bulk of the problems with it, such as incredible costs.
It's not a coincidence that the industries heavily distorted by the government in the US are the costliest - health care and education. Ironically, this interference was all aimed at reducing cost.
The book you cite doesn't seem to support your argument.
Firstly, you say they nationalized many industries but the book talks about individual companies. Nationalizing an industry means nationalizing every company within that industry.
Secondly, this does not appear to have been motivated by the failure of capitalism but rather the opposite. It was done in response to union strikes. Unions are usually understood as being against capitalism and free markets; they want to replace individuals "voting with their wallet" by collectively taking control from management via committees of (frequently communist leaning or outright communist) representatives of the workers.
Thirdly, it says quite clearly that as late as 1943 the War Department had done so few of these seizures that it amounted to "barely a dozen". By the end of the war they had seized around 60. That's a drop in the ocean of the US economy, which is why it's not well known.
So this example doesn't really seem to argue against the notion that the US won because of free market capitalism. The only places where they had to step in and become authoritarian (very briefly) were places where capitalism was breaking down thanks to communist agitation.
To be fair, Roosevelt in his 1945 State of the Union Address advocated for imposing forced labor on American civilians. Fortunately, that went nowhere.
The US raised scores of millions of immigrants from poverty to the middle class. Poor people immigrated to the US, people with nothing but a suitcase. The US has seen the most spectacular rise from poverty to wealth ever seen in history.
You won't get very far turning up to the US with nothing but a suitcase today. If you don't have significant assets or a confirmed job offer you'll be turned around and sent back to where you came from, and sometimes that'll happen even if you do have those things. Holding on to an outdated view of what America is like is ... unhelpful.
Have you been following the news on what's been happening at the southern border? 100,000 people a month coming through, some of them throwing their children over the wall to get here.
One of the reasons Mexico is poor is because it had a disproportionately strong elite class dedicated to maintaining huge disparities in wealth through monopolies and more or less obvious slave labour.
When the industrial revolution rolled through town Mexico couldn't take advantage of it. Back then the US used to welcome anyone from anywhere with ambition and an interesting idea.
China is also seeing large numbers of people rising from abject poverty to a "western" more affluent lifestyle. I don't think that this is a terribly good yardstick for fairness and freedom in a society.
If you were to ask the Chinese Communist Party, whether or not they "turned away" from Communism, I think the answer would be a hard "NO".
China has a complicated economy. If anything, China demonstrates that Communism and Capitalism can be made to co-exist in a weird disconcerting way. I don't think it's a particularly good model for how to run things, especially when mixed-in with authoritarian leadership.
Let's not forget, however, that China is far from an "affluent" country. If your definition of affluent is focused on measurements like income and net worth of the population, China as a whole still falls well outside of affluent.
Yes, there's a sliver of population that is wealthy even by international standards, but the bulk of the population has income in the low $100's of dollars per month. That's what enables China to be the factory to the world. Is it going to stay that way? I don't know, but I think the CCP wants to keep it like it is.
> If you were to ask the Chinese Communist Party, whether or not they "turned away" from Communism, I think the answer would be a hard "NO".
Not really. The answer would be "communism with Chinese characteristics". The nuance is in the "Chinese characteristics" part. Whatever that means, but definitely not communism. China or CCP is communism in name only.
For suitable definitions of communism, a stock market is a good way to get the means of production into the hands of the workers: they can buy stocks and share ownership of the company they work for.
I don't claim to be an expert in politology, but what I remember from school seems to indicate that the common ownership of the means of production is the core idea of communism. I don't understand how a stock market is antithetical to that. As I see it, common ownership of the means of production can be achieved both with and without a stock market. Could you maybe elaborate your standpoint?
A stock market allows people to acquire ownership in companies, but it will be highly unequal: some of them will have more, some will have less, some will have none. That unequal ownership will generate correspondingly unequal rewards.
No communist system can allow that. Instead, the companies are uniformly state-owned and the rewards added to the state coffers where they will be pillaged and shared by the politically connected.
In the past, a lot of (non-slave) people immigrated to the USA precisely because they were impoverished -- for example, Irish fleeing the Great Famine, among many others.
> "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore."
Whether those words are as appropriate today may be another matter, of course.
I understand this example to be of historical note because it was exceptional. Many people came over for the promise of farmland or gold or something that they could capitalise on.
They came because they were poor. For a fictionalized account of Swedish immigrants, see Moberg's novel "The Emigrants". You might dismiss it as fiction, but the preface writes:
"To ensure the verisimilitude of his story, Moberg did extensive historical research in both Sweden and the United States. He studied county records in Smaland and read many collections of letters that immigrants in America had
sent to relatives in Sweden during the nineteenth Century. His studies also included trips to the Maritime Museum in Gothenburg. This research gave him a record of living conditions in nineteenth-century Sweden and a feel for life
aboard sailing vessels in the days when emigration had not yet become an industry backed by large steamship companies."
I'm curious if that's a figure for the number who enter and remain long-term, or does it include those who are quickly detained and expelled? I.e. does the Mexican border account for a million-plus annual increase in overall US population?
1. The USSR had (and has) much more resources per population. Japan achieved great wealth with insignificant natural resources.
2. Middle class and rich people rarely immigrate. It's the poor that do. Did you know that the reason the Titanic was built was to en-masse ship poor people to the US? The first class bit was mostly window dressing. The money was to be made by cramming poor people in below decks. In colonial times, America was populated mostly by people escaping prosecution, indentured servants, sons who weren't first born and were not going to inherit anything, teens whose parents could not support them, etc. The Chinese and Japanese people came to escape poverty.
Furthermore, South America was and is rich in resources, but it remains poor. Nothing like the US happened there.
> Did you know that the reason the Titanic was built was to en-masse ship poor people to the US? The first class bit was mostly window dressing.
Third-class passage was £8, approximately $1000 in today's currency, i.e. more expensive than an equivalent trans-atlantic flight today, and too expensive for poor people to typically consider.
> Middle class and rich people rarely immigrate. It's the poor that do.
"The median income of foreign-born households in 2016 was $53,200, compared to U.S. born resident’s median household income of $58,000."
> Third-class passage was £8, approximately $1000 in today's currency, i.e. more expensive than an equivalent trans-atlantic flight today, and too expensive for poor people to typically consider.
Desperately poor people spend well over that to get smuggled across the Mexican border today.
> A decade ago, Mexicans and Central Americans paid between $1,000 and $3,000 for clandestine passage into the United States. Now they hand over up to $9,200 for the same journey, the Department of Homeland Security reported last year. Those figures have continued to rise, according to interviews at migrant shelters in Mexico.
> Some would-be migrants give up homes, cars, livestock and even farmland tilled by their families for generations and take on debt to pay the fees.
You can call people who are willing to spend and have access to $10,000 desperate, but I don't know how useful it is to call them poor.
Your last sentence quoted clearly describes people with inherited wealth. In my opinion, that's not describing a poor person, by almost any measure. It falls into the sibling commenter's category description of petit bourgeoisie.
Those people are really poor, they bet their lives on those $10000 that they don't even own. They are not "willing to spend", they are willing to lose their life for it, it's a huge difference.
They borrow it from the extended family, everyone chips in, it's like a risky investment that some day can pay off.
When the extended family funds are not enough, they borrow from the "organized crime", i.e. the narcos.
Sometimes they don't pay the whole sum before and now they own to the coyotes, which are also the narcos.
During the immigration process, they are getting abducted, executed (whole buses of immigrants were killed in Mexico), the rules change midway, usually they own more money at the end that were agreed at the start.
Subsistence farmers tend to have both land and homes, yet are desperately poor, eking out just enough of a living to survive.
Some go into debt, hoping there'll be opportunity on the other side of the border. Some lose their lives when they aren't able to pay those debts back to the coyotes.
> too expensive for poor people to typically consider.
Seriously? Poor people spend a grand on iPhones.
Besides, have you seen those pictures of immigrants going through Ellis Island clutching their battered suitcases? Do they look like rich people to you?
> That seems like middle class people to me.
Yup. Came poor and moved up to middle class.
BTW, I am properly amused by your theory that the US became a superpower via rich people immigrating and transferring their money to the US. That doesn't even pass the sniff test.
> Seriously? Poor people spend a grand on iPhones.
Where? Poor people get second-hand iPhones, or subscribe to plans that bill you in small installments over a few years. And even those who manage to save up and buy a new one - in a modern civilization, a smartphone is a basic necessity, right there after food and shelter.
Seems like just below middle income, which is typically deep in the working class and pretty far from the petit bourgeoisie, the balance-of-capital-and-labor-dependence middle class between thr working and capitalist classes.
That's a fine definition, but puts middle class in at least the top 10%, if not comfortably the top 1%, by wealth and income.
My question was whether we have different definitions of poor - if you are distinguishing poor as everyone below middle class, and this is your definition of middle class, then you're simply claiming that everyone is poor.
Saying "poor people do X" now just boils down to "some people do X" [for example, the claim that poor people buy $1000 retail iPhones]. To me, that's not a very useful or interesting definition for this purpose.
That's all nice and rosy but current picture is veering from this away more and more. Class mobility in US is largely a self-perpetuating myth. And US, say compared to Europe is clearly class-based social system where divider is your wealth.
So when you come in poor, you stay relatively poor, and can hope your children will fare better (and most don't).
Your WWI remarks are not correct (any fresh joining recruits would compare well to starved demoralized decimated trench troops). Read some german WWI literature, they didn't care much US specifically joining the fight, it was just more enemies. If Australians would come, it would be the same.
> Class mobility in US is largely a self-perpetuating myth.
I personally know several millionaires who arrived in America with a suitcase and a dream.
> class-based social system where divider is your wealth.
The usual definition of a class is legal privilege based on your parents. This does not exist in the US.
> So when you come in poor, you stay relatively poor, and can hope your children will fare better (and most don't).
People aren't desperately trampling 1000 miles and throwing their kids over the wall just to be poor. In America, they have freedom and a darn good chance to do well. Communist countries are different, they have to build walls to keep their citizens from escaping Utopia.
> Read some german WWI literature
I've read about WW1 from actual historians.
What do think the beaten down German soldiers would have thought encountering masses of American troops better equipped and far better fed than they ever were?
> The US has seen the most spectacular rise from poverty to wealth ever seen in history.
This is not true, historians collectively agree that Korea has seen the most spectacular rise.
Also, your comment was spectacularly off-topic and anachronistic. A country being a manufacturing powerhouse during WW2 doesn't mean that immigrants have a fair chance today. First they need to be able to enter, then they need to be able to succeed. That's the topic.
S. Korea's population is 51 million. The US elevated far more. Besides, SK's economy is free market, not communism.
> First they need to be able to enter,
100,000 per month are flooding over the border.
> then they need to be able to succeed.
Evidently they believe they can, or they wouldn't come.
As for around here in Seattle, there are immigrants everywhere. I jog through the park most days, and I hear languages from all over the world. They have their stereos blasting away, and large families with kids running around, and parked cars line the street. The smells coming from their cooking are delightful, I wish they'd offer me a bite :-)
Looks to me like they're doing very well.
I have no idea how you can conclude that the American door to immigration is shut, or that they are doing badly.
> S. Korea's population is 51 million. The US elevated far more.
You can't talk about countries with relative sizes and use absolute numbers. If you want to use this fallacy, I can tell you that the US is dwarfed by the whole of Asia.
Anyway, the original argument was that the USA isn't a country where everyone has a fair chance, but you absolutely want to turn it into anti-communist, pro-free-market propaganda.
The US could do all that because they removed the free market from the economy. Everything was turned into a planned economy to feed the war effort. Free markets would have completely failed in this case.
> Note that we have a right to equal treatment under the law, but that is not the same thing as a right to fair treatment.
In practice at the aggregate population level, that is such an important distinction, and leads to the kind of pay-for-play judicial system the US increasingly practices, which weakens the US' internal signaling on important inefficiencies to root out. The more money tokens you put into the system, the more "fair" treatment you obtain, regardless of the negative externalities imposed. This is not new in history and around the world, but US rule of law has been declining for decades [1], and I believe it bodes ill for the US.
The meme about Soviet equality is pretty misleading. Their particular brand of autocracy increased inequality if anything, just expressed in different ways.
The USSR went from being a feudal society to an industrial society with a significant lead over the US in a number of areas, including rocketry and space, within a couple of generations. With a devastating world war in the middle.
There's a lot to criticise about the Soviet system, just as there is any in totalitarian culture - but in science and engineering, "hammering everyone down to the bottom" is simply not what happened.
You could make at least as strong a case for "hammering most people down to the bottom" in the US, because easy and affordable access to high quality education certainly isn't considered a public good, and plenty of talented people are excluded from it.
As someone born in the USSR, this is an oversimplified view instead. You can claim that the USSR had some good science and engineering, and it did, but it wasn’t always to benefit the people and was definitely done by oppressing the people. Remember that the USSR was the country that marched a platoon of soldiers under a mushroom cloud (without telling them of course) to see what would happen to them in the name of science. It’s also the country to displaced a village by rolling in tanks and telling people to move into houses of the people living in the next village over, immediately, and giving no reason. This was done to detonate an underground nuke to see if a natural gas fire could be put out. It’s the country that refused to evacuate Pripyat after the Chernobyl accident because it would have looked bad. The USSR wasn’t some benevolent scientific community bent on bettering lives. Its scientific interests were primarily military-related.
Anti-social argument ad USSR is usually considered to be a fallacy common in the USA.
For example, Swiss are very social people. Up until recently they did not even have a minimal wage defined in some of the cantons, yet even the worst jobs are usually extremely well payed. I.e. a python developer has just like 2x more than a garbage man. Anything a human touches is expensive.
In European countries, even some of the Eastern ones, there is usually a top-notch single payer health care system. That's social.
You can also have a high quality state funded education systems. A social aspect of politics does not require you to go all dictatorial suppressing basic rights. Please stop using it. It's ridiculous.
It might be possible to make life more fair, but how much power would you need to grant an entity so that they could ensure this? How could that power be mis-used? Who gets to define what "fair" is?
We're being very vague here. What is unfair? Unfairness smells of injustice, and injustice entails entitlement (i.e., something is unjust when I do not receive something that is owed to me). But we haven't named the goods that we're supposedly entitled to. Where's the injustice? Or is it envy masquerading as righteous indignation?
It's just that fairness is the wrong goal to use, because things can always be seen as unfair from some point of view. It's better to simply try to make things more logical/less random, and also more productive.
Can I ask you a question without I swear any implicit judgement.
Do you gravitate towards conservative politicians?
Because I'm finding that this is the main distinction between Progressive and Conservative-minded people in today's western society. You can account for religion (there are religious leftists and atheist rightists). You can account for racism (there are plenty of racist liberals)
But I am developing a mental model (I'm sure it's not original, but I don't know enough about philosophy or sociology to determine who I should read with similar mindset) that the biggest difference is exactly the quote above.
Progressive people believe that society is not fair but could be. Conservatives believe it is not possible, and it's silly to even try.
Of course the implicit advantage of conservatism is if that enough people don't try, then it doesn't work, society does not become more fair, and conservatives get to point and say "see?"
And, on the flipside, you can spend a generation striving to achieve "real communism" like the USSR did claiming that true socialism is just around the corner, and never actually make any progress because the goal posts keep moving.
> Instead of being consumed by envy of others, you can make your own life better.
And this is the key reason why I don't agree with you and why I will continue to fight for fairness and equality and equity improvements. I don't want to improve my own life at the expense of others. I think that is inherently selfish and defeatist. I'm a humanist, and I want my contributions go towards maximum optimizations across a multitude of humanity.
No – since wealth has diminishing marginal utility, wealth transfer programs are inherently positive-sum.
And freedom is not a system, it's simply the situation of being able to do what you want without being punished. The freedom to steal is a freedom, just one people generally shouldn't have.
I'm sorry. Did you just claim that getting 1000€ would improve the quality of life of Jeff Bezos, you and me, and a beggar on the street, by an equal amount?
> Freedom has many meanings. I made it clear which meaning I refer to, and it isn't the one you're using.
And yours is very idiosyncratic. And mostly redundant with "market economy", except a market economy doesn't technically require people to be selfish.
> I'm sorry. Did you just claim that getting 1000€ would improve the quality of life of Jeff Bezos, you and me, and a beggar on the street, by an equal amount?
Jeff Bezos does not buy bread with every incremental thousand dollars. He builds institutions that provide bread for a cent cheaper to millions of people.
The assumption that you can equate these utilities is exactly the fallacy that caused so many to starve in Russia and China. Markets coordinate capital for the betterment of people at large.
Jeff Bezos does not buy bread with every incremental thousand dollars, he spends $42million of them on a monumental clock. But perhaps it is more allocatively efficient to ensure that the beggar, lacking the funds to buy bread from Whole Foods, dies of starvation.
The assumption that because someone has more money, they would make better decisions on how to coordinate it was also what caused so many people to starve to death under feudalism.
Jeff Bezos does not buy anything with every incremental thousand dollars. In some important sense, it's not even money that can be spent. When people talk about Bezos' wealth being $200 billion dollars, almost all of that is just the last trade price of Amazon stock times his shareholding. (In some sense, it represents the value of an institution that supplies people with stuff more efficiently.)
Suppose we take that $200 billion from Bezos, who only spends a tiny fraction of that on actual things for his personal use that use actual resources like land, materials, workers' time, etc, and instead try and spend all of it on stuff that uses those actual resources like food, healthcare, etc. The only way to do that is to find people who'll do the reverse trade - who'll take hundreds of billions of dollars they'd otherwise have spent on things made with actual resources that'd make their lives better, and instead buy shares of Amazon with them. This actual money that represents an actual claim on limited resources cannot come out of the pockets of Bezos or other billionares, because they don't have that much - it has to come out of ordinary people's pockets. Same with the shuttering of businesses during coronavirus; it's ordinary people who'll have to feel the consequences of all the goods not produced and services not provided, because they're the ones who consume them.
The approach where people like Bezos become billionaires through coming up with ways to supply goods and services to people more efficiently doesn't have this problem, because it works by making the pie bigger for everyone rather than just trying to change the size of people's slices. And I'd personally trust Bezos to do this much more than all the people who seem ideologically opposed to the idea such a thing is even possible...
> Jeff Bezos does not buy anything with every incremental thousand dollars. In some important sense, it's not even money that can be spent.
Luckily, nobody in the discussion has claimed this. What they have claimed is that it is possible a hungry person who died of starvation may have needed an incremental dollar more than someone who spent $42 million of their incremental dollars on a project to build a clock with no expectation of any return on it (or even a person of comparatively modest means who never has to look at the right hand side of a menu) and as such, diminishing returns to disposable wealth may exist.
Clearly actually addressing this claim is a lot harder than demolishing straw men and accusing everyone that suggests that diminishing marginal returns to money are a thing of being a communist.
Personally I'd trust people whose belief that markets are useful in generating wealth (again, not in dispute here) stops short of assuming that if people don't have money they probably don't need to survive as much as others need to conspicuously consume.
The problem with that argument is that $42 million is a lot, lot less than $200 billion dollars, especially when divided across even just the population of the USA. Not even enough for a dollar per person - in fact, when you consider that's over something like a decade, it's probably more like a cent per person per year.
By comparison, the National Endowment for the Arts apparently has a budget of $162 million per year. I'm sure there are plenty of hungry people who have much more need for that money, so by your argument maybe we should shut that down and give the money to them. It'd certainly provide them with a lot more funding than just the money from Bezos' clock...
The problem is that again you are attacking an argument I did not make. At no point have I suggested "maybe we should shut that down and give the money to them" or that we could feed the entire population of the world using Bezos' clock budget, never mind enthused about US arts funding. At no point in this thread have I made any public policy recommendations at all.
I simply observed that it seems unreasonable to argue that a person saved from starvation by a marginal dollar doesn't feel more benefit from that marginal dollar than someone who wouldn't stoop to pick one off the street feels from marginal dollars that accrue to their bank accounts anyway. So some, but not all, redistribution can be positive sum.
Acknowledging the marginal utility of a [disposable] dollar to Bezos might be lower than that of someone earning less than subsistence seems both fairly obvious and not at all close to communism as the user I originally responded to suggests (Funnily enough, denying the validity of any sort of interpersonal utility comparison whatsoever actually does makes it impossible to make inefficiency arguments against communism or any other sort of government waste. Obviously millions of people behind the former Iron Curtain are wealthier today, but who's to say the Politburo members losing control over resources didn't suffer more?! I mean, that's silly, but so's arguing Bezos cares about loose change at least as much as the average poor person). Arguments against the idea that public might need education less than the wealthy needed to keep those dollars were pretty critical to there being a viable market and workforce for the Amazons of this world too.
If we actually want to discuss the efficiency and inefficiency of different forms of government and private [non]intervention it's much easier to do so without the unsupported and vaguely feudal assumption that no improvement on a status quo can be observed.
> Jeff Bezos does not buy bread with every incremental thousand dollars. He builds institutions that provide bread for a cent cheaper to millions of people.
Or possibly builds rockets and other vanity projects. Or bribes politicians. Whereas if that money was used to buy bread, it would definitely end up at a bread making company.
> The assumption that you can equate these utilities is exactly the fallacy that caused so many to starve in Russia and China.
In a discussion about economics, the probability that someone will bring up the Eastern Block and ascribe all its ills to whatever happens to be the not orthodoxly capitalist position being discussed somehow even exceeds the probability of someone bringing up Hitler.
It could be and also could not be, it depends on where you draw the line. You want to incentivise strong people as much as possible (freedom), and also help weak people as much as possible (redistribution).
If you tip too far over to either side, it's going to be a bad thing, and there is probably a much better way to find the sweet spot than to argue over what is "fair".
You're confusing freedom with capitalism. Understandable, since we need to spend 40+ hours a week to earn our "right" to shelter, survival and general health. In other words: the right to exist and participate. That doesn't make us free - it makes us beholden to an employer if on the payroll, the market if self employed and the greater economic system in both cases.
If we were truly free, we would only spend time doing things we thought were actually inherently valuable. For some of us, that would mean accumulating wealth. For a great many others, that would be the Star Trek kind of life about exploring, arts and discovery. Then again, that kind of freedom will perhaps be relegated to utopian dreams for a long time yet.
Oh phooey. I've been an employer and employee many times. At no time was I "beholden" to my employer, and at no time were my employees "beholden" to me. It was a simple transaction - trading labor for money. Either party could (and sometimes did) walk away at any time for any reason they pleased.
I've even been fired more than once. Didn't matter, I just got another job. No employee ever genuflected to me, either.
You're arguing in bad faith by making a caricature out of my argument. Please don't. I meant there is a clear dependency, like in software. Your app isn't free of dependencies if it imports other packages. It needs them to function. There's vendor lock-in.
> Either party could walk away
This might have been true for you, but doesn't generalise well. Yes, in theory people can walk away. In practice, they're dependent on their employer for healthcare coverage, survival, general life stability... etc.
It's not because you or I currently have a financial buffer and can survive stretches of unemployment that this is the case for the entire population. In case you missed it, a majority of Americans cannot afford a $500 dollar surprise expense out of pocket (0).
Imagine you're a millennial with college debt in an area without a lot of jobs and analyse how free you really are to leave the one job you managed to get. How likely are you to get funding for a business? What's the tensile strength of your bootstraps?
You're entitled to look at it as a simple transaction, but the distribution of leverage for most people is distinctly asymmetrical, especially in anti-union countries like the US. So are the legal advantages, political influence, legal accountability, etc when comparing companies to individuals.
In practice, they do, all the time, in every place I've ever worked, including min wage jobs.
> they're dependent on their employer for healthcare coverage
That's because of stupid government laws. Besides, if you leave you get COBRA for 18 months or something like that.
> survival,
Not in the US. Don't exaggerate.
> general life stability...
??
> a majority of Americans cannot afford a $500 dollar surprise expense out of pocket (0).
That doesn't mean they're poor. It's easy to have a quarter million dollar salary and spend 110% of it.
> in an area without a lot of jobs
Hop on the Bus, Gus. Go where the jobs are. My extended family moved all over the US for better jobs. Heck, I wound up in Seattle to get a better job. Cost me a couple hundred clams worth of gas driving my bucket of bolts there from Kansas. Heck, somehow the penniless migrants manage to travel all over the US to get work.
> So are the legal advantages, political influence, legal accountability, etc when comparing companies to individuals.
The courts are heavily biased in favor of the worker in legal disputes. And have you ever seen the press take the side of Amazon in any dispute with labor? Or any company?
No one is suggesting that you are physically trapped in the job with shackles, but to insinuate everyone is in a position where they can just 'walk away' from their job is disingenuous at best, downright ignorant of the world at worst.
It's about the same level as 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps'.
Well, people I've employed walked away whenever they felt like it.
> ignorant of the world
I only speak of the US. Before the pandemic upended things, unemployment rates were very, very low in the US. That doesn't auger for employees being beholden to employers at all.
You clearly speak for a very select set of people.
Which is fine, but stop projecting that onto the vast majority who absolutely cannot walk away from work 'whenever they feel like it' if they've any sort of family or responsibilities.
You're talking about the US and people not being beholden to employers - I'm sorry, but that is absolute nonsense for basically the entire working class.
>Progressive people believe that society is not fair but could be.
Is this the case? I would think most adults have realized that nature does not do fair, and it cannot be made fair.
I was under the impression that "progressivism" is more about raising the floor for quality of life, not about making things fair. So as to avoid the situations of favelas next to high rise condos with pools on their balconies.
My experience suggests most progressives don’t realize that:
- they tend to be young;
- political activists who have done nothing else;
- or drug addicts.
I can count on my fingers the number of serious progressives I’ve met who aren’t one of those things during my entire life in Seattle.
The “progressive” movement is why we have addicts encamped at a school — they’re so out of touch with reality, they view that as “compassion”.
Meanwhile, most adults realize police sweeps don’t solve homelessness, but they do prevent violent drug addicts leaving used needles all over the children’s playground.
>The “progressive” movement is why we have addicts encamped at a school — they’re so out of touch with reality, they view that as “compassion”.
I would not classify that as progressivism. Things like voting rights and ranked choice voting, progressive taxation, environmental protection, increasing educational opportunities for all, more nutritional options for food at schools, access to mental and all other healthcare, etc would fall under progressivism in my book. Of course, I'm not the arbiter of what is and is not deemed progressive, but generally I was under the impression that the goals were to keep the bottom quintiles moving forward, not letting drug addicts establish camps on or near school grounds.
> Progressive people believe that society is not fair but could be. Conservatives believe it is not possible, and it's silly to even try.
Having recently decided that I dislike leftist politics and that I align more with right-wing politics (in theory, if not in practice), the thing that switched in my mind is: why does it matter whether or not society is fair? I think that's the wrong question; I don't see any intrinsic value in fairness.
I think the right questions are: (1) how can we improve our average level of well-being, and (2) how can we reduce suffering?
So in my view, progressives incidentally get some important issues right including single-payer healthcare and environmental conservation. These policies tangibly improve our quality of life. But all the emphasis on equality, fairness, etc? Useless, in my view.
You can never make life fair for someone who is disabled. I wouldn't trade my health for a billion dollars. There are endless people taller, smarter, faster, younger, handsomer, healthier, etc., than me. Obsessing over the implicit and inevitable unfairness of that is a total waste of time and energy.
More generally, no two people are the same. It's not possible to make it fair even for two people, let alone billions.
I absolutely agree, the idea of a fair society needs to go away, it's just a dead end that only leads to fighting over crumbs and stifling productivity, what we need to do is get rid of jealousy and resentment.
Yeah but the point is that any attempt of redistribution in the name of fairness, is also equally unfair from the opposite perspective. So there is no way to make anything "more fair", if you take from one person to give to another, it's always unfair for one of them.
At our nearby state high school, during physical education class, they didn’t allow people to lap anyone during running periods because it was unfair to those not fit.
You can imagine what that looked like and who was walking around the gym with everyone else following slowly.
It's not uncommon among leftist to suggest systemic punishments and disadvantages for people who are born with certain physical and/or mental strengths and talents.
> how can we improve our average level of well-being
What average?
MEAN:
Two systems of 100 people
System 1: 1 person with $10m and 99 people with nothing (mean=100k)
System 2: 100 people with $50k (mean=50k)
The latter is far far better despite on mean being worse.
MEDIAN:
Two systems of 100 people
System 1: 51 person with $1m and 49 people with nothing (median=$1m)
System 2: 100 people with $250k (median=250k)
The latter is better despite median being worse.
If you want to decide if a system is fair or not, think which system you'd like to live in if you rolled a D10 and ended up being born into the decile you landed in. Roll a 10 in america and it's great. Roll a 1 and you're collecting cans and hoping you don't get an ingrowing toenail.
Yeah but in reality what happens is that if you redistribute too much, you stifle productivity to the point where you have no improvements at all, and your mean will start to regress. Why? Because you have removed all incentives for people to improve, and rather introduced the perverse incentive of preferring to be on the receiving end.
In reality it's more like
System 1: 100 people with $50k (mean=50k)
System 2: 98 people with $60k and 2 people with $10m (mean=259k)
And then people argue that System 2 is worse because the small increase for the most people is not worth the humiliation of some times seeing a person with 10m which is unfair.
Norway, Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Austria, New Zealand, Luxembourg, Germany, hellholes like that where you can't even have the joy of going bankrupt because your kid got shot at school and you need to pay for the surgery
Yeah but my point still stands: the more you redistribute, the less incentive people have to work, and the less money you will have overall.
If you redistribute too much, you will lower your overall productivity and not have enough money and your average will go down. If you redistribute too little, you will have a revolution.
What I'm trying to say, is that everyone wants to have a system where you can simply raise the mean without any increase in inequality, but such a system doesn't exist, so there's always a trade off to be made, and when people ask for less inequality, that will also mean less money overall, and also less for you if you are in the middle.
> Yeah but my point still stands: the more you redistribute, the less incentive people have to work
You'll have to back that claim up
> everyone wants to have a system where you can simply raise the mean without any increase in inequality, but such a system doesn't exist
Well I don't care about the mean - not much use if Rockerfeller takes 90% of the income of a country and the rest have to deal with the 10% even if the mean is high. I care about how much money I have (specifcally what goods and services I can get with it), and how that is affected when various things happen (someone crashes their car into me, I get a cancer diagnosis, find that the CEO has been running the company into the ground and we're all laid off)
During the Great Compression, income inequality dropped dramatically, while the median increased. This was driven by policies like strong unions, the New Deal and Price Controls, and resulted in America's golden age, where the working and middle classes were far better off in 1960 than they were in 1930.
Personally I much prefer System 2 and I'm happy that I have 60k instead of 50k. Money is just a tool to give me freedom, and 60k means more freedom than 50k, so I'll take that deal any day.
The rich guys who have 10 houses or whatever, doesn't bother me at all, I simply don't care, and I'm sure that they are not much happier. Exactly the same way that I don't spend my time grudging over the fact that some guys are 100 times more handsome and charming and talented than me
As someone that has moved from fairly hard left to centre (though probably considered far right by some), to me the difference is that progressives think they can make the world better, conservatives think that such actions are likely to make things worse. Thomas Sowell brings a lot of evidence based arguments to such discussions.
Not the poster you were asking, but I did appreciate the stress you put on trying to ask a non judgmental question and I thought I'd add a personal observation, which is: disillusioned progressives also think that way.
You try and you try to make society a fairer place to live in, but realise the system is so far gone that nothing you ever do will ever make a difference. So the morally correct and efficient thing to do is to expend those energies into helping you and yours, co-operate with those who extend mutually beneficial arrangements to you, and so on. Not only is it silly to try to create a fairer society, life has extensively proved that it is silly. Not that you disagree with the ideal, it's a great ideal, but it doesn't work in practice. Not that you wouldn't wish to follow it if you could (you would), but life has taught you that trying hurts you and yours.
Re: your mental model, I think there are a lot of studies and thinking that have gone into this, but I was immediately remidned of this old ted talk by Jonathan Haidt [0]. I am sure there are tons and tons more research on the topic.
> Not only is it silly to try to create a fairer society, life has extensively proved that it is silly.
Seems rather defeatist. Wouldn't you agree that different societies across the world vary in their levels of fairness? For that matter, how about different societies across time?
I wasn't suggesting to give up, rather it was a response to the poster above, who was trying to build some kind of mental model of how progressives viewed the world in contrast to conservatives. I was trying to highlight that there are progressives out there who are simply tired and just want their lives and the lives of their families to be OK.
And I think that's OK. Personally I tend to look at things negatively and push onwards anyway, but I also understand when people say they don't want too much negativity in their lives. So I get it.
It's not so simple. In fact they are partially capitalist but mostly socialist - the majority of their wealth (>70% if you exclude housing) is publicly/socially owned.
Only Norway is lavishing in the oil wealth of an immense sovereign fund. Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and the others are not so heavily influenced by oil. You can't generalize Norway to the rest of them.
Familiarize yourself with the basics of welfare state economics before engaging further. Norway isn't the only Nordic. All of the Nordics fund their welfare state with generally high levels of redistributive taxation, it's not oil-specific. Limited withdrawals are made from Norway's large SWF and it funds very little of their welfare state.
And of course, there is nothing unique about oil as a form of capital. Many forms of capital exist, all of which generate income that can be used for similar purposes.
Yes but norway do fund their welfare state with oil, which is why they didn't have to make as many budget cuts in the 90s as Sweden did. And Sweden financed its welfare state by being neutral in WWII which meant they had intact industry while all the competitors were wiped out, so they could just export for 4 decades. Much like the US also did after WWII for example with the car industry which were profitable until the 80s when the japanese caught up.
I'm still sceptical if there even exists a successful welfare state that does not rely on natural resources, or the aftermath of some war.
Similar situation. And any time you use the nordic countries as an example, you have to realise that the middle class takes a huge hit for financing the equality.
Sweden has implemented a LOT of trickle down economy tax breaks for the wealthy people during the 2000s, such as completely getting rid of property tax, wealth tax, inheritance tax. Just to keep money in the country.
At the same time, the working people of the middle class are taxed really high, and that's used to show the world how equal Sweden is, while conveniently ignoring the tax breaks for the wealthy.
Redistribution always has a price, it's not like Sweden has invented a superior system that creates value out of thin air, Sweden has the poorest doctors and programmers of all the western nations, and people love to talk about equality but when they actually consider Sweden and find out that their salary will be 50% they go to another country.
Maybe not experiencing a terribly high brain drain, but the development is definitely stifled by the fact that it's so unattractive for middle class people to move to Sweden compared to other countries, even Germany is much better which is why so much of the IT companies are establishing in Berlin and not Stockholm.
> I'm still sceptical if there even exists a successful welfare state that does not rely on natural resources, or the aftermath of some war.
I was referring to this. Both Denmark and Finland were to a large extent involved in WW2, and neither have natural resources of the same kind as Norway.
Or is your opinion that they are not successful welfare states?
I'm not sure to be honest, but for sure they were not involved in WW2 as much as other allies, and also I'm certain that the middle class in Denmark and Finland have very humble incomes/lives compared to for example the UK or US.
Sure, which means that they were greatly affected by the war. Thus, according to you, they should not have been able to create a successful welfare state.
Of course if you include the option of fleeing to another country where there are more jobs and opportunity, it's real easy to create a successful welfare state. This is always how leftist politics work, there's always some external funding or circumstance that plays the biggest part of the success, but attribute the success to how perfectly they can divide the profits, ignoring where they actually came from. But when you have to cover all your expenses by robbing collective pete, it doesn't really add up anymore.
Sooner or later you run out of other people's money, and then you have to create more incentives for people to work, to take advantage of your own strong people to create the value, and that comes with more "inequality", and requires you to compromise on the welfare.
I'm convinced that a country that cannot attract hard working highly educated people will struggle to be successful in the global economy, and the way forward is to educate people to become more self sufficient and independent, and not to continue with patronising welfare politics that were made for a post war booming economy.
I had a teacher in high school that liked to dole out life advice. Even looking back decades later, most of it was actually pretty good. One of them was:
You can be smart -or- hard-working and do fine anywhere. But you will always be bested by those who are smart -and- hard working.
> The two guys I knew, who attended Oxf. and Camb. were both fired because they were more talk then action.
Talk is easy but action is hard. There's a chance they never actually had to "put up or shut up" before in their life. And if that's true, there's going to be a strong aversion to actually taking action because that's when they might actually fail -- potentially for the first time in their life.
#3 and #5 are by-products of extreme privilege. Take your average bootcamper, they usually rack up a huge bill majoring in something in college (often a literal dream major), then somehow field a 17k check to just waltz over to tech when they need an office job finally.
Not everyone can do this. You have to be really lucky to play games like that and still be fine.
The same goes for ‘going off to start my own food truck’. These options don’t exist for people that can only afford one solid go at this.
Just to clarify, Czech Technical University is free (for Czech citizens) - I also graduated there. I understand what you're saying, but I am somehow repulsed by the idea that such a system is considered a "privilege". It doesn't have to be a privilege. If you don't have good public universities in your country, you should consider getting involved in politics.
My point was mostly centered around freedom. Everyone knows the rules of the game. Those who can’t toy around, play the game straight and narrow (good grades, stay focused on one concentration, and hope you picked well).
It’s a luxury to try one thing or another, no matter the cost (cash and time), and still land in an ideal situation as life progresses.
#5 - I think that grading is not a good feedback for many disadvantaged kids and their parents. I was being told that without good grades I will not land a good job. This kind of advice is worthless for a 12yo and not really true. Having a good attitude towards learning is an universally more applicable and could lead to a thriving society when applied generally.
Don't be too firm in the belief that you yourself learned this in spite of your experience. Perhaps you learned it because of. We tend to appreciate and yearn for the things we don't have, the things we are too busy doing "work" to enjoy.
It does sound "better" to not worry about what -- now -- seems unimportant, but if your kids will grow up in capitalist society, it is critical that they have a focus on competing. Success is doled out in a pareto distribution. If you aren't already starting from the top, you have a very, very long uphill climb. Which will get worse. It's hard to enjoy the beauty of the world on an artist's salary.
#6 Getting fired isn't necessarily failure. These guys certainly have fallbacks. I'm sure they've learned from the firings. Maybe at their next role they will be superstars due to this experience?
In summary I think you are unfairly diminishing the value of an Oxford or other elite education. Partly or mostly because of the disillusionment. But it's not just about the academic/education part of the experience. Actually that's the least important part. Maybe when they were founded, it was quite important. Nowadays the internet gives us so much access to information that filtering it is more important than being spoon fed it. That doesn't mean elite universities aren't very important social signals and don't convey unfair advantages.
I expected Oxford undergraduates to be the best from all over the world, intensely passionate about their subjects. What I found were kids more passionate about drinking and clubbing and gossiping than studying. There seemed to be some weird hierarchy about who sits where in the dining hall that was completely bizarre. 'Default' social activities organized by the various committees all involved brain-dead clubbing and irresponsible drinking - at Oxford! Or sometimes 'posh' versions of those, where you wear black tie and aimlessly wander around some area holding a glass of sparking wine until you are bored out of your skull, a.k.a. a ball. The more ambitious kids were more busy padding their CV to land a good job than doing what interests them. It was not like the world of Turing or Feynman at all.
The academic part of life was good. The tutorial system is great, lectures were OK, practicals were good. The selection of courses was great. But doing CS, there were few opportunities to socialize with people in your degree - you see them in the lectures, then you go back to your college. And that isn't great - perhaps it's good for people that are doing humanities and need to 'network', but for anyone doing anything interesting, you are not going to find too much in common with an undergrad studying English literature and more interested in drinking and pointless gossip/small talk.
And even many in the CS degree did not seem to have that 'hacker' mentality - that was mostly seen in international students.
What I found shocking is that so many students were doing poorly academically. The coursework and the exams were not super challenging, especially given that you chose so many of the courses, so you were mostly studying the actual things you wanted to study. Given that Oxford was supposed to have the very best students, passionate about their subjects, it was really odd how little so many cared.
Again, very strangely, few undergrad students from England seemed to go on to do Master's or PhDs, but many international students did. The graduate-level environment seemed much better, too.
A lot of the stuff you mention, the drinking/clubbing is just true of teenagers / young people in the UK and you probably missed out the drugs and sex.
When I went to a "top tier" uni in the 90s after watching the young ones and reading adrian mole I expected students to be going to rallies and being "intellectual". I spent more time reading about other subjects than my own and underperformed in my degree. Students were mostly over-privileged rich kids, doing exactly what you'd expect young people to do when they first got a chance of freedom.
I was lucky enough to get a full grant, which I wouldn't get now and overall I enjoyed the experience, which echoed far after I left the environment. It wasn't quite what I expected it would be though.
I can't help but think that for every student more into drugs/sex/drinking/clubbing, there is a kid out there who was genuinely interested in studying from the top academics that probably didn't even bother applying because they thought they wouldn't be able to get in (or won't be able to afford it).
I am also surprised that the culture you describe seems to be tolerated at best and even encouraged at worst. Sure, it would happen anywhere, but it is surprising to me that it is not strongly discouraged in society overall and at top academic institutions in particular.
I spent some time with students in Russia and they were even worse! Most of Europe is similar to an extent, but sure there are people who are obsessed with studying and learning, but there are a lot more who are keen to get away from their parents, spend money on beer and find girls/boys.
Most Asian students I met who had come over to Europe were pretty serious.
Anecdotally some friends from Wales who went on a study year to America were put into counselling and threatened with expulsion for their "drinking problems", they were pretty normal British students really, I think they ended up somewhere fairly conservative.
Out of interest, what was your experience with students in Russia? Would be interesting to compare with my experience.
I suspect there is a big difference in Russia between top science universities and everywhere else. In my opinion, humanities education is of very poor quality in Russia so I could well imagine a party culture there. But the curriculum in top science programmes tends to be so intense and passing requirements strict enough that I doubt there is too much partying going on. However, a lot of the coursework I suspect is also still too outdated and often irrelevant.
There is also likely a big difference between students living at home and living in dorms. Who knows what happens in dorms, but the commuting students in my opinion don't tend to get too wild.
Finally, the social scene is just structured very differently. There are fewer elected subjects, and most of the social life happens during/between classes - the whole year just spends a lot of time with each other naturally and bonds over common struggles. There is a culture of trying to involve everyone in some sort of social life. You don't have to sign up for anything - it happens by default. Although I think international students would be treated differently and actually perhaps excluded. Instead of clubbing or going to bars, social drinking revolves more around drinking in someone's kitchen and engaging in pseudo-philosophical conversations.
Of course, my account is from a long time ago so things may be very different now.
The students were pretty intense, but I'm guessing the ones I met in the bar weren't the ones studying chess games and reading maths papers. They do often play chess in the bar, while they're downing vodka...
"Watching the English" by Kate Fox [0] was a revelation.
I grew up in the UK, and agreed with every word. Especially the bit about social contact and drinking. When travelling in other cultures, I still find it insanely difficult to start a conversation with a stranger unless we're in some situation that I can think of as a pub (and even then it's not easy). The way that random Americans will spark up conversations anywhere is alarming, but I'm envious.
The drinking culture is weird. It's interesting seeing the German drinking culture here in Berlin as a contrast.
They literally promote "Freshers week" in every Uni I've ever been to so good luck on ever seeing that change. There's too much money in swindling young people so I doubt it's going away.
> I am also surprised that the culture you describe seems to be tolerated at best and even encouraged at worst. Sure, it would happen anywhere, but it is surprising to me that it is not strongly discouraged in society overall and at top academic institutions in particular.
You’d think so, but the whole culture has this problem. Western societies have replaced Christianity with the religion of hedonism and “self actualization.” It’s aspirational—most people don’t even live or want to live that way. But it would be taboo to condemn it or at least mark you as someone who wasn’t with the times.
I was totally underwhelmed by the quality of the kids. I'd won a math contest with a couple of Polish kids in my team the summer before, and I thought my new classmates would be much the same: engaged, sharp. Instead I got a couple of fellows who seemed to be there for the drinking. It was quite deflating.
I did eventually round up a number of people with a better attitude, mostly from international circles. It's not like we were teetotal, just the balance of work and play seemed to fit an elite university better. Luckily I managed to forge a group of friends across colleges.
I also started to see there was no logic to who got in. It seemed to be purely a confidence game, especially for the arts subjects. I mean sure, they were probably better academically than your average person, but above some low bar it seems to be a lottery. I started meeting a lot of people who spoke confidently about things, but their confidence did not seem to be grounded in reality. There were so many of these people it gave away the game, I'm not sure I'd have noticed if I hadn't seen this concentration of BSers as a young man.
What was really missing was a love of learning. It's as if the kids had spent years gaming exams under high parental pressure, and now they were at uni as long they could get out with an OK grade they wanted to relax and explore the social world.
The tutorial system was wasted on some of my classmates. It's cringeworthy to be in a lesson with either 2 or 3 students, and one or two of the other kids hasn't done work. I also got proper sparring partners from outside my college, so I did ok eventually.
> kids more passionate about drinking and clubbing and gossiping than studying ... not like the world of Turing or Feynman at all.
I think you may have underestimated how much Feynman was a prankster, womaniser and bongo-player who occasionally did some physics as well :)
> you see them in the lectures, then you go back to your college
There's kind of a hidden initiative test here; it doesn't have to be that way, you can organise alternatives, and there's a whole intercollegiate infrastructure of extracurricular activities. There was a somewhat long-running university computer society when I was an undergrad, through which I found all the hackers, and some of us ended up starting a hosting service in my third year: https://www.srcf.net/ - that taught me far more of practical use than half the computing course.
May balls: yes, these are a bit odd and above my personal poshness threshold. I think they really do date from the era of Turing but not his subculture within that era, the big black tie social event belongs more to capital-S Society of debutantes and aristocrats.
> What I found shocking is that so many students were doing poorly academically.
The difficulty gap is real. Unlike all the education system people will have encountered previously, you can't coast unless you are very smart, and there will be extremely challenging material. It's .. deliberate is the wrong word, but there are certainly tutors who will up the difficulty level if their students are not struggling.
The mental health and motivational/pedagogical thinking is also stuck in the 19th century. Some of this does need to adapt to today's students.
> The more ambitious kids were more busy padding their CV to land a good job than doing what interests them.
This is far more what Oxford is "for" in British society because that's how you get ahead, unfortunately.
My issue with Feynman, the one I cannot get past (no matter how much I like his lifestyle and intellect), is the work on the Manhattan Project. His defence was, essentially, that a war was on, and the US needed the same capabilities as other nations were developing. However the resultant catastrophes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki just negate that for me. He didn't order those bombs to be dropped. But he is partially responsible for those deaths, whether he foresaw them or not.
Incidentally, I've not read much about his womanising - perhaps I'm not reading between the lines?
He was a promising young scientist who worked in the team.
And although the bomb was used on the Japanese, it was meant primarily as a weapom against Hitler.
Feynman was an American Jew. Imagine yourself in the same situation. There's a dictator who hates all Jews and basically any race which is not Aryan enough for him. He wants to kill them all. A gigantic war machine which is fighting the rest of the world alone is also possibly building something similar.
You get the opportunity to work on something that undermines the devil, that will buy you and your country protection against it. Will you not work in it?
> The mental health and motivational/pedagogical thinking is also stuck in the 19th century. Some of this does need to adapt to today's students.
If it adapts to pedagogic techniques now known to be more effective, that’s a good thing. If it instead adapts to changes in the students themselves, I think that’s more likely to be bad than good, or is at a minimum not obviously good.
Just because some round pegs have arrived, doesn't mean we should stop hammering them into these square holes!
Obviously there have been changes in the students over the years, not least the fact that the universities now admit women and Catholics. There have also been far broader changes in society; it wouldn't be illegal for Turing to be gay in the present Cambridge.
The noisy ones are the ones making the most noise. You might not have noticed the studious ones, as they were hiding away in their rooms :-) You even say that you didn't see your fellow CS students much.
On a more serious note, it comes back to what are top universities for? Excellent learning - you said that the tutorials, lectures and practicals were good to great, and I can assure you this is not true of all universities. But also: Building up a network. Gaining credentials. Learning those subtle cues that will allow you to mix with the elite.
That is true. What frustrated me is that the social/cultural set up only seemed to amplify it, rather than counteract it to balance things out.
For example, in fresher's week, 'default' organized activities were clubbing every night of the week. Sports achievements were celebrated with ceremonies, pub parties, chalk drawings on the walls of the college, publications in the magazines.
There is nothing wrong with any of those activities, as has been mentioned that is just what some loud teenagers getting a taste of freedom like to do. But you would expect a top academic institution encouraging other tendencies to even out the social 'hierarchy' a bit. The very fact that 'you might not have noticed the studious ones' who were 'hiding away in their rooms' is the problem when it is happening at the top academic institution in my view.
Freshers weeks for all UK universities are like that. And most teenagers are fine with that, rich or poor. It's an easy ice breaker.
I don't know how you managed to miss this during your university career, but there are absolutely tons of clubs in every university. Sports, political, hobbies, music, etc. Nothing to do with drinking, apart from maybe a once or twice yearly optional social night.
There are 400 clubs registered at the OU student's union:
Clubs and societies tend to be too... organized, specific, serious? If you are Feynman, do you join the bongo drum society? I mean you play them, but you're just having fun, joining a society for bongo drum players seems like an overkill. Do you join the lockpicking society? If you enjoy playing backgammon every now and then, do you join the backgammon society? If you are interested in hacking software for fun, do you join a competitive computer security club?
After all, you are not interested in these things narrowly and specifically. You just would like to hang out with like-minded people that like to have fun in these sorts of ways.
In these societies, you mostly end up with some specific 'serious' activities (e.g. a talk, a lecture, a discussion, or something competitive). And social engagement then happens separately, usually at a social in a pub, also as a 'targeted' activity. It is a good way to get more serious about your interests, but does not seem like a natural way to make friends.
Seems like the school culture can shape behavior and varies a lot. At my undergraduate college, my fellow math undergraduates* conformed to the stereotype of focusing on academics. Other activities like sports, games, and anime were considered less-serious, and someone who spent too much time socializing was frivolous. A student won more respect from peers by being capable in class than by being good at Smash Bros in the lounge, and they attempted to portray, whether true or not, the image of being hardworking and studious.
At my graduate institution, the undergraduate attitude was quite different; socializing was important, learning the minimal amount was efficient, and cheating was socially accepted (by peers, not necessarily the profs).
I was shocked at the difference in academic achievement this caused. The tests at the second institution were far easier, yet people were failing them. This was a difference between scoring 80% on nontrivial proofs, vs scoring 60% on one-step theorem applications. I don't think the incoming freshmen were vastly inferior. Rather, the culture at the first institution forced students to apply themselves through peer pressure, because that's what they perceived everyone else to be doing, and also what was valued. My advisor at the second institution seemed quite pessimistic about changing its culture, and viewed the first institution as a rare exception that would not be emulatable. He did agree on the extent of the difference.
From the prof perspective, this is all irrelevant because it's quite rare for a school to develop a good culture, so it's not the experienced reality for most profs. Asking to become faculty at a top institution where the undergraduates also all care about academics is like wishing for unicorns.
* Some selection bias here: I took grad classes, so these were the only math majors I had exposure to. Although, these were the only classes available because the school was small, so I'm not sure what an undergraduate could take if he didn't want to take grad classes.
> Seems like the school culture can shape behavior and varies a lot.
Like other universities, things are also going to differ between subjects. But OxBridge has autonomous colleges which provide undergrad accommodation and arrange the individual tutorials/supervisions for undergrads. So there, college culture also matters. Some colleges certainly have a posher reputation than others, some have a reputation for being sportier, and so on. If you read a typical "OxBridge is really like this" articles without bearing that in mind you'll think the whole place is one thing.
Elite schools are there for two types of students:
A) Incredibly smart and hard-working students that want to be around the leading experts in their fields. These kids end up as post docs / researchers, and get to work/stay close to those schools.
B) The ones that want to land elite jobs (gov / banking / finance / law / etc.) - for these, the social activities are quite more important.
Don't get me wrong, you need to be a top-tier student / pupil to get in, and the latter students are also such. But different priorities.
This contributed to my departure from academia (UK professor). The majority of students didn't care, the staff cared even less, and senior management just wanted bums on seats.
Gaining a position in academia is something that takes a lot of time, so the disappointment is still with me.
May I ask in what field you were working and what your occupation is now?
I'm curious if you can be a professor after the old model, before structured academia, find those willing to learn and do research and continue your passion without the encumbrances (and benefits) of a Uni. That probably depends on your subject area.
So, do you get your fix of mentoring/teaching/research through that; it perhaps through FOSS involvement or ...? Not suggesting you have to, just your comment suggested that was/is your passion.
- collaborating with my previous co-authors in my own time
- publishing educational content
and you're right, it is something I'm passionate about. The list above is my attempt to stay involved, but I'm not sure how that will work out long term. Hopefully I will find something sustainable.
"But doing CS, there were few opportunities to socialize with people in your degree - you see them in the lectures, then you go back to your college."
One thing I loved about my program (Baylor) is that they had a dedicated dorm building for engineering/CS students. I think it's because their program wasn't very prolific and they were trying to attract people (though I had no real complaints about it), but it created this awesome environment where the average person on your floor probably had a gaming desktop to show off, or would love to talk about a project idea you had, or might have an idea of how to recover the linux install you've just borked, or might be hosting a Minecraft LAN you could join. Not to mention the study-group opportunities, etc. It was a really great way to spend my first two years.
I went to a state school and state sixth form, and my experience definitely deviates from that presented in the article and some other comments here. I think the part of the article which focuses on more personalised teaching rings the most true for me.
There may be differences due to the subject, level, or college. I did a one-year masters in STEM in a very international graduate Oxford college. But the vast majority of members of the college were hard working, insightful, friendly, and not at all posh. There was a very friendly and open social life, and I definitely don't consider there to have been a great facade presented. Perhaps I would have found different in an undergraduate degree in the arts, or a different college, but I didn't get that sense from the people I spoke to from other colleges and faculties. My best guess is the Oxford college the article writer ended up in was rather more grand and snobby than any of those I spent time at.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that this certainly isn't the only experience, and I'm confident none of the friends I made there would relate to the article's assessment. I found it a fantastic place to meet insightful, honest, friendly people in addition to all of its merits for learning.
In U.K. collegiate universities, like Oxbridge and Durham, there is a huge cultural divide between colleges and courses.
I went to Durham. I was - I am - a posh kid - albeit one who’s acutely and painfully aware of his advantage. The college I was in was stacked to the rafters with posh kids. Everything orbited the social life - the balls, the ents, who was where in the pecking order of committees and executives. I mean, the college was in a literal castle. If you were reading arts, it was easy enough to stay entirely within that world. Economics, politics, classics, history, philosophy, etc., were all filled with pashminas and brogues. I spent time in those lectures as I was running a miniature essay mill to boost my social standing, as that was just what you did.
I read physics - and the crowd couldn’t have been more different. The majority of science students were in the hill colleges, nearer the science campus, and came from state schools, rather than the mess of public school alumna you found in the Bailey colleges. I was a lone wool blazer in a lecture theatre full of t-shirts, rope-knit jumpers, pink hair and leather jackets.
For me, it was an illuminating experience, and it made me realise that I didn’t really fit in either tribe - although 20 years on, the few people I’m still in touch with are from my course, not my college.
The U.K. is a peculiar place when it comes to class. I realised over the years that how I said what I said, how I spoke, how I dressed, were all far more important to our business (because of course I started a business, with a posh friend from school) success than what we said, what we did. To other posh people, it says you’re one of the club, you can be trusted, nice school tie - to people from outside that world, it induces either a hat-clutching deferent reverence, or outright hostility.
I liked the people who were outright hostile, because by that point I absolutely hated the same thing that they did - even though I benefited from it.
Anyway. Experiences vary, and which college you’re in has a huge impact.
An “entertainment”, as the sibling says - anything from theatre to a festival to a party to a booze-up to a charity run to a charity booze-up run - basically student-organised activities of one variety or another.
Similar story here. Perhaps arts degrees are different, but I could not relate this piece to any of my experiences from when I was studying for a CS degree. It felt as though the author was writing about a different country.
I had several close friends studying for their own Masters degrees in subdesciplines of Anthropolgy and History of Art, and I'm not aware of them having had different experiences either, so my current best guess is down to it perhaps being an undergraduate degree in one of the most exclusive colleges.
The teaching was personalised, flexible and interactive. That kind of system keeps people like me in the room, fired up and engaged. Kids like me, who don’t flourish in school, can benefit from such attention, and focus, and belief. A good society would strive to give it to them.
Yes, this is the best part of Oxford. My undergraduate education there consisted of:
1. Lectures to large groups of students
2. Some small classes
3. One-on-one or one-on-two "tutorials" with specialists in their subjects
#3 is the core of the Oxford system and is what makes it (and a small number of other UK universities who do this) special.
I went there from a bog-standard state school and it was an excellent education.
This is what resonates with me, I went to a declining secondary school inthe UK and the amount of clever, clever kids who were written off because they were poor, or their parents were from the wrong side was scary. They just didn't bother with them. So much wasted talent and potential. Think of how much they could have contributed to society.
As someone who was also raised in the North of England, went to a state school, and also ended up going to Oxford, this article is spot on.
It took me a while to realise that the state educated people were often the more talented ones (they've not had anything handed to them on a plate), and our lack of poshness was actually something to be proud of - not something to feel inferior about!
Also comp educated and went to Oxford. I feel like in the last 5 years or so it's become "uncool" to be posh. Feel like this has been instigated by (in the West) Brexit and Trump bringing the Establishment down a notch.
Me too. Agree completely. I had to battle to get allowed to take the entrance exams -- my school didn't want to pay for an invigilator, so I sat them in the deputy head of the sixth form's office. I got in. It changed my life. I also realised that, on a course like physics, most of the students came from quiet, nerdy backgrounds like me. It was often history / english / classics / PPE etc where the "great public schools" made their presence found. Oxford is a big place with ~30k students -- people can find others 'like them' if they're so inclined, and the cliques are to some extent self-perpetuating.
That's interesting, because Harvard has less students than that in a country with 5x the population. So, in terms of enrollment number / population, oxford is more like the whole ivy league rolled into one school.
Sorry -- I got it wrong. That "~30k" includes undergraduates and postgraduate students; it should also have been "~24k". The actual numbers are Undergraduates: 12k; Postgraduates: ~12k. Also, bear in mind that it is a very international university: International students make up 43% of Oxford students; 64% of all graduate students are from outside the UK, as are 20% of all undergraduates. So, think of the pool as being a lot larger.
I think it more than just "poshness" that has taken a hit, trust in experts also has. I would argue that this is why casual podcasts have become a lot more popular recently, whilst the BBC has has become less trusted (an has changed its tone to adapt with the times).
My experience wasn't quite the same but I went to a college that had the highest proportion of state school students, and only heard about the most egregious posh people behaviour through rumour. The parker-bowles mob were notorious, for example, but I never came across them.
Yes there was an article in the Times recently about how for the first time in a long time enrolments in private schools are falling. Apparently a lot of kids also now resent their parents for sending them to a private school as they are made to feel awkward about it (i.e. that they have kind of cheated the system). Of course that's not to say this is the cause of the drop in enrolments.
In the UK after the Conservatives came to power in 2010 electing an Old Etonian, I felt culturally there was a shift towards "posh" is good as a signifier of status and social power.
I feel like in the last 5 years or so it has turned to posh is "uncool".
In the US, I feel like they had something similar. Obama was elected in 2008, but some people did have concerns of electing someone unestablished. To assuage these concerns, Obama promoted and kept safe the interests the elite at the time. Not detracting Obama here - that's the position he was in back in 2008 when some would have considered electing a black man to the Office as unthinkable.
Heath, son of carpenter/builder, Scholarship to Oxford
Wilson, father was an industrial chemist, scholarship to go to school, bursary to go to university
Callaghan, father enlisted man in the Navy, then the coastgard, and died young leaving family relying on charity. Got a place at uni but couldn't afford to go
Thatcher, father was a grocer. Got to Oxford on a scholarship, studied Chemistry
Major, Parents were in theatre, then ran a garden shop, lived in a rented flat, left school at 16, did a banking correspondence course while failing to get a job as a bus conductor
Blair, Father was a university lecturer, went to boarding school at Fettes, took a gap year then did Law at Oxford
Blair brought in the posh = good, Champagne Socialists era. It's also what powered Labour - the alliance of the metropolitan left and the working class left (the latter having gone to the tories now)
Brown and May had normal backgrounds, but Blair, Cameron and Johnson are very different to Heath, Wilson, Callaghan, Thatcher, Major, Brown and May.
I disagree with the idea that Blair brought in posh = good. To me this feels like a continuation from Thatcher/Major.
Just going on personal experience I feel like 'chavs' had social confidence around the early Blair, and tended to be dismissed late Blair/Brown. By the time Cameron was in office I fell like there was an idea that Eton, private school, investment banking, Mayfair = good, or at least this was stronger under Cameron than Blair. It's all flipped now.
As much as Trump is a golden toilet billionaire, and made elites richer, I'd argue he did not promote the elite. In that elite definitely felt less safe in their social position.
Inverse snobbery (finding "posh" accents hilarious and assuming posh people are vain, a bit stupid and overreliant on their parents) has been around for a lot longer than that in the UK, including amongst middle class people living in the Home Counties! As has posh people downplaying their background or making self-deprecating jokes about it.
Wouldn't have thought many people would associate Trump's brash noveau-rich American stereotype act with the English Establishment, and Brexit actually made some Old Etonians popular in parts of the country that historically had very little time for them.
I mean the Establishment as of 2012-2016. The tribes of people who held major social power / status symbols: have higher average wealth, pride themselves on being educationally credentialed, overrepresented in high paying professional fields.
Boris is Establishment, but went against the Establishment's beliefs by backing Brexit. I'd also argue that Cameron was more Establishment than Boris.
I am acquainted with a disproportionate number of Oxbridge grads, mainly through my old school, which has always targeted those universities for its boys.
While everyone is smart and pleasant, there is the constant reinforcement that Oxbridge grads seek each other out throughout their lives to almost exclusively hang out with each other. I mean, as towns they're not exactly next door, but in London there is the joint Oxford and Cambridge club on Pall Mall so they can carry on as they were. They're often hopelessly insular in this regard and I have never quite understood it. Why your university would provide such a strong identity for yourself all your life, I don't get.
But it will only be a few of them that view it as an identity.
For them it'll be a chance to talk with people from different walks of life such as bankers, lawyers, doctors, artists, entrepreneurs, business owners, or COs. Since so many have wide breadths of opportunity they'll be able to talk to people who have had novel experiences from themselves.
I mean the default experience seems to be a sheltered(maybe insular is a better word?[1]) one, but I can't say I'm not similar in my own social circle. I haven't purposefully gone out of my way to mingle with people in other groups outside of my normal social circle except at work/hobbies/sports and really only talk to those I already know at Friday drinks.
[1] Really I'm kind of looking for a word to express diverse sameness. Something you'd use to express "European countries are all the same except of course each is a unique culture". Maybe talking about untraveled Americans(US) except a word to contrast one who only lived in their rural town vs one who worked and lived from New Orleans, to Detroit, to New York, to Nebraska, to Hawaii and Alaska while not having left the US.
I'm friends with a gang of three Oxford graduates, who met each other there in the 80s. I know them through mutual interests and like minded mutual friends. They're just part of the gang, get on with everyone regardless of background.
What you do notice though, is they absolutely know how to work their asses off. They're constantly organising things, writing stuff, offering to edit and help develop other people's work, coming up with new ideas and sharing them. They know how to dig deep into a topic and root out the interesting, fun and unexpected, and do something with it.
There are other people in the community who are much the same, it's a very collaborative community. It's not that they're the only people who stand out, but they're right up there.
I hear you and it’s like this with my school alumni too, but I don’t think that the school and university can take too much credit for this, all these boys (and I went to a boys’ school, if that wasn’t clear) were very much like this at 11 or 13, education just refined and channeled them. This is why I find the self-selecting group quite odd, as membership is only one indicator of common ground.
Oh sure, to a large extent top selective schools have great results because they select the best pupils to start with. The question is are they adding the best value; are they the best environment for students that talented to go to. I would hope so, but I suppose it depends what the student wants out of it.
This is very much a given - start with the best and success is pretty much guaranteed. I am not sure many kids even know the difference between two schools, I certainly had no clue. Perhaps the costs these days - unaffordable - are making students more clued-up?
Actually, for what most colleges charge, they should provide free clubs for alumni?
Although, the thought of my pompous college mates is not a memory I want to think about today though.
I went to a state school. I honestly thought my local community college did a much better job, but graduated anyways. I went to a professional school, and kinda thought the same--a whole lot of wasted time.
I will never forget our last party though. Everyone graduated with their degree. We were at this party, and the atmosphere was different. I couldn't figure it out until years later though.
My date that night was a stunning, innocent, affable, young lady. I recall guys at the party making a bee line to her. The ladies at the party gave me the look. A acquaintance came up to me, and said, "She's very young Danielll?". She was 20?
Anyway, everyone kinda of changed. They talked different. They talked like they did something wonderful by graduating. They were posing, instead of standing? The biggest poser had a job at Open Space. He thought he hit the lottery. That night he should have worn an ascot. Never talked to him again.
I remember thinking this is it? Well it's better than working full time. Hiding in school was something I adored, but knew I was no different than anyone else. In all reality, I felt guilty. The worse day in school was better than any day at my part time jobs. The four years were fun.
On the way home, Michelle said, "I've never felt so weird at a party." I had no idea what she was getting at other than being the worst party I have been to. She then said she felt like she didn't fit in.
I told her, "I don't fit in with those people. College was a joke for the most part." I couldn't believe the way people changed. I had a steady girlfriend who went to UCD. She was a different person upon graduating. Just so full of herself? I wasn't the greatest boyfriend either, by dating someone else, but I was young, and we both knew our relationship was baked years earlier.
End of story, but reminded of my young pompous classmates upon graduation.
Would I go to a alumni club after graduation--hell no, but colleges should provide them. I am a wacko, and despised networking, and schmoozing, but my classmates would be at the club. It would be a great selling point for colleges too?
(I had a premed/business education from a state school. I guess it's a lot different than going to an Ivy League school? I honestly remember eight classes maybe, that I felt were worth the time. My rambling post is about the obnoxious levels of self accomplishment so many young grads have.)
Oxford and Cambridge don’t charge any more than other universities in the UK, and the Oxford and Cambridge club is a private members club that isn’t meaningfully affiliated to either institution.
I went to a public state school for undergrad and a private Ivy for grad school. While there are diverse socioeconomic backgrounds at the latter, people with similar backgrounds as myself are definitely far and few between. The standards of living is far removed from the penny-scrounging dollar-menu-eating existence that I knew.
I'm still taken aback by the disparity in leisure activities; it seems like a lot of people here escape to some international Instagrammable getaway for a weeklong academic break, whereas back home everyone would be fine just hunkering down or maybe visiting their parents for a weekend.
I have a similar story; undergrad at a public state school and grad at a private Ivy. My experience at the Ivy was eye-openi. The loudest [1] Ivy undergrads came from private elementary/high schools and had a very dismissive view of the students who matriculated from public elementary/high schools. Academic breaks were used for luxury travel.
[1] "loudest" in the sense that they made sure that other students knew where they came from.
At the risk of coming off as cantankerous, I think that this has worsened with the increasing immediacy of social sharing. Due to both the ephemerality and deluge of content that expedite a post's expiration date, there's even more pressure to stay on that FOMO-generating content treadmill. There were groups of students who kept partying throughout the pandemic and bragging about how "magical" their weekend wine tours and date nights were; any time I've been in a comparable situation, it's been kids acting and recording each other on their phones, feeding the simulation machine.
The first rule of ditch digging is to stop digging ditches.
I love my hometown, but it was a slog wading through all the people who ultimately wanted to keep me under their thumb. Many of them so close that I just couldn't see it until a lot of damage had been done. Everyone has feelings of jealousy, whether they are conscious of it or not, and the closer you are, the more likely it is you will be competing over resources, the conflicts of interest are just inherent.
They told me to work hard, but their idea of working hard was often just making the same damn mistake over and over again, as long as no one had to admit they were wrong, as long as authority was respected and hierarchy maintained. Whether your brow is high or low, I think you just have to learn to break free from those people, and learn to think for yourself, because they are everywhere, because it is an intrinsic consequence of social organization.
The UK has made an export industry out of this snobbery and attracts hundreds of thousands of international students for this prestige. I wonder if ethologists have studied this behavior. Queen bees are not selected with an IQ test, they re selected randomly and raised by the plebs to become their queen.It's a successful strategy evidently. I guess something similar might work in primates where the random selection is the 'nearest trusted family friend'.
Just picking up on the Queen Bee point - there can be multiple queen bees created, and when they hatch the first thing they do is kill all unborn queens and then fight to the death any that also hatched.
I’m not so sure. The Queen bees responsibilities as a “leader” are literally just to stay alive and reproduce. Most primate leaders have a lot more responsibilities which they need to excel at.
Maybe statistically they still turn out to not matter? Would be interesting to know.
Although not working class by any means, I experienced a similar kind of culture shock after going to state schools until I was 16, then spending two years doing my A-levels at a very expensive boarding school. I was the commoner, surrounded by people whose parents own diamond mines in South Africa, investment banks in Hong Kong, large country estates in Scotland. There were some nice people there and I made some good friends, but there were also plenty of other people with the unquestioning belief that Rebanks describes - effectively that they were born to rule. It could be really intimidating, to the point where the belief was so strong that it bent reality and could convince other, less-well-off people to play into the submissive role that their confidence implied. However, if you started not to play the game, they became really unsettled, like they didn't have any flexibility - it was all based on a fixed set of scripts that most people didn't deviate from.
Also reminds me of that school report of Boris Johnson - "Boris really has adopted a disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies. It is a question of priorities, which most of his colleagues have no difficulty in sorting out. Boris sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility (and surprised at the same time that he was not appointed Captain of the School for next half). I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else." Plus ça change.
I've studied in Cambridge myself, and feel like some context needs to be added here for American readers not to misunderstand something here: Admission to Cambridge & Oxford isn't related to family wealth in the same way as admission to "elite" universities in the U.S.
For example: Tuition fees are in line with government-set rates and are no different for these institutions than other British universities (at least it was that way, back when I was there in 2005-2009). While the U.K. was part of the E.U. these low rates even applied to students coming to study there from elsewhere in the E.U. It is only "overseas" students who are asked to pay significantly more.
One thing that I found noteworthy when applying was also the fact that, for Cambridge, the admissions process had two phases: The first was academic acceptance. Those application forms made absolutely no mention of money. After a student has been academically accepted, there is a second phase in the application process that involves application to scholarships and ends with the applicant having to provide proof that they have the required funds to sustain themselves through the study period.
This was very different from what I remember about applying to universities in the U.S. which asked you to disclose your family's financial situation on the same application form that was also used to decide academic acceptance. That form, incidentally, also asked about things like family members who have attended the same university, etc. ...so there is much less transparency there to guarantee that a U.S. school wouldn't just use your socioeconomic standing directly as a criterion to decide admission.
There are, of course, impediments to social mobility into the class of Oxbridge-educated people, but it revolves more around academics than about money. For example, I found that the students disproportionately came from families where their parents were career academics. The relationship with those families having a lot of money was not something I particularly noticed.
The "poshness" of it all, particularly where undergraduate circles are concerned, also comes to a large extent from free choices that students themselves make to try to socially set themselves apart from their peers at other unversities. For example many willfully adopt "received pronunciation" to replace their natural dialects.
Cambridge And Oxford and a few other “elite” unis don’t allow students to work during the school year afaik, this alone filters many students but “ironically” not the poorest ones which may be eligible for a full tuition cover + stipend.
Low income families above the low income limit set by the government who cannot afford tuition + covering living expenses tend to be those who can’t really afford to attend those schools and this includes a lot of what would normally be considered middle class.
Yes you can take a loan but Cambridge and Oxford as notoriously expensive to live around, student accommodation aren’t cheap and the overall cost of living is quite high.
So you tend to skew towards either those who have money or families which planned for this from the get go, a few token poor people but quite a few of those that come from an “average” household.
I think it needs to be clarified that this (and the financial statement on application mentioned in a grandparent comment) are only correct for postgraduate study.
There's no financial statement required for undergraduates because government loans are available to all UK students. This covers tuition and living costs (albeit scaled by parental income). No family needs to "cover tuition" for undergraduates.
People don't work during term time because they are very short (8 weeks) and intense. Plenty of people had work at home during the holidays.
I guess there are some people who have on paper wealthy parents who don't contribute as much as the government thinks they should, but in general lack of familial wealth is really not a barrier to undergraduate study at Oxbridge.
Cambridge at the very least provides reasonably affordable accommodation for all years of your undergraduate degree. And some colleges provide accommodation for Masters and PhD students as well.
The UK student loan is not perfect, but it does include a living stipend (which is family income based). Obviously it sucks to have to take a loan, but working is not a necessity (until after graduation). I’m not sure how reasonable the living stipend amounts are, but Cambridge is definitely reasonably affordable if you go out of the way for groceries etc. It’s a bit more expensive from a nightlife perspective, but again, college bars tend to have fairly cheap drinks.
The loans aren’t great if you are a student not living with their parents and studying outside of London if your parents have a household has a combined income of £45,000 you will be eligible for only £6000 p/a grant.
If we take a £80,000 combined household income which won’t go that far in London especially if the family has more than one child and still paying for a mortgage or what is becoming more and more common these days rent. And while 80K is more than double the median household income this literally can be the salary of say two teachers or police officers with some seniority then you are only eligible for £4000.
For Cambridge last time I checked student accommodations cost £150-200 p/w at the minimum. That more or less your loan gone on housing alone.
The university itself requires the students to have £10,000 (well £9880) per year for living expenses this means that a family making £40K needs to add about £4K or 10% of their pre-tax income to their child’s education even with the stipend.
It’s possible sure but many families simply can’t afford that.
And more importantly because students are required to show proof of funds the parents would have to prove that they have that money ready and quite possibly for the entire duration of the degree if their income is too low for the uni to consider them to be able to afford support.
That's not only a side effect, but a stated principle: After you gain admission, you have to prove that you have the money you need to sustain yourself either through a scholarship, or you have to literally show a bank statement that shows that you have a lump sum in your account that will sustain you for the normal amount of time it takes to finish the degree. Living expenses are factored into this at a set rate. You are not allowed to rely on funds you intend on earning while you're actually studying.
I don't think this is all that wrong: If you are dependent on working to be able to cover your living expenses, it takes time away from your studies, which reduces the likelihood you'll pass, increases the likelihood of needing more time to get to a degree. Needing more time, means having to spend more time with low-paid jobs to sustain yourself until you get to the degree, and it all adds up to a risk that's difficult to manage for the student, and universities definitely don't want the drop-out rate that results from that.
You wouldn't start building a house when it's uncertain that you have enough money to be able to complete the project.
The way to manage the social ramifications is by keeping tution rates low and providing scholarships. Cost of living is not something you can control particularly well although, at Oxbridge, they at least do what they can on that front through university-owned housing etc. Also: Those are university towns that don't have cost of living and rents spiralling out of control as a side-effect of other industries that are there, like is the case in the Bay Area or Boston, which is a major metropolitan area even without the universities.
The people who get shafted the most by this as I said aren’t “poor” but rather in the middle, the stipend that is available as a loan to students is dependent on the income of the parents and even a £45K household income would limit that stipend to around £6 whilst Oxford requires £10K for affordability and it’s unlikely that most households would be able to make up the difference unless they planned for that and made sacrifices early on in their child’s life and most importantly were lucky enough to able to afford to make those sacrifices consistently.
"You wouldn't start building a house when it's uncertain that you have enough money to be able to complete the project."
Sorry for the completely OT reply, but this triggered me because it is exactly how banks in Thailand do lending to build a house. Once all the details and total cost are known, the bank lends about half of the needed amount and then checks on your progress. If you didn't get about half the house built they don't fund the remainder.
I think it’s needed when the collateral for the loan is something that doesn’t yet exist. If you were to put up something other than your yet to be constructed home as the collateral you could do without a draw schedule. The bank is rightfully concerned that you build your house to the level you described in the plans so that they can recoup their money if you some day default.
Some of them get finished other ways. Others get taken back by the bank when the owner decides to stop making payments on a loan for an unfinished house. You often see half finished houses that are slowly rotting.
>After you gain admission, you have to prove that you have the money you need to sustain yourself either through a scholarship, or you have to literally show a bank statement that shows that you have a lump sum in your account that will sustain you for the normal amount of time it takes to finish the degree.
I think this is for graduate students - the undergraduate student system is different.
> There are, of course, impediments to social mobility into the class of Oxbridge-educated people, but it revolves more around academics than about money. For example, I found that the students disproportionately came from families where their parents were career academics. The relationship with those families having a lot of money was not something I particularly noticed.
My observation studying in Oxford was that there was a big dispatity in opportunity, but it derived more from inequities in the quality of schooling available than unfairness in the admissions process. I met a lot of state educated students, but most of them came from well-regarded schools on upper-middle class areas that got hundreds of students into Oxbridge univeristies each year.
Very few came from schools like mime that couldn't even work out which entrance exams I needn't to take for the course I was applying to.
I don't remember being asked about wealth on college apps. Are you thinking of the FAFSA, which is a government form, and not part of the application process?
I was thinking of the M.I.T. application form circa 2004. I seem to recall that it explicitly asked not just if I had enough money but to disclose how much money I had precisely, and it also explicitly asked if there were family members who had attended M.I.T.
Maybe things were different in 2004, but those forms do not cross paths with admissions decisions whatsoever, for at least the last decade. The financial aid office won't communicate with admissions until offers have been decided. MIT is actually one of a few schools that is need blind for even international students, but almost every top school is need blind for domestic students these days. They want to have a financial aid package available to offer at the same time as admissions, which makes sense, so submitting your financial info prior to acceptance would be necessary for that.
Yeah, I'm not suggesting that they would have done anything nefarious with that information. I'm just saying I liked the transparency of the Cambridge system. You'd hold an admission letter in your hand before anyone had asked any questions about money, making it very transparent that money had nothing to do with that decision. The possibility that you could end up in a situation of having an offer but no money would still exists, but then at least you'd know that that's what happened. If you put all the info on one form you have to basically just trust them to handle the information appropriately.
Yeah I guess also the sticker price of Oxbridge being lower may make this the better choice. Even though the majority of students don't pay the list price at top US schools it is a really daunting number, and so for low income students not familiar with the process I can imagine getting an offer without any info about aid would be more stressful.
I think you may have a misunderstanding of how the US education system works. There are lots of scholarships and financial aid opportunities accessible for students that need them. Most “Elite State Schools” also have some kind of programs that give preference to bright students from their own state. E.g. University of Texas gives an automatic admission to the top 7% of Texas high school graduates. In state tuition is almost always ridiculously cheaper.
Yes, also the private schools in the US that are comparable to Oxbridge all do need-blind admissions, and have very generous aid. Average cost paid at those schools is much lower than at mid-tier private schools or out of state schools. There are definitely a lot of indirect selection effects that lead to a smaller number of low income students at these schools, including legacy admissions at most of them as he points out. But acting like Harvard sorts by income in its admissions decisions is definitely not an accurate reflection of how things work in the US.
There are many of parts of the US education system that weed out poor people and disadvantaged people before the University has to deny their application. The poor people who get into elite universities in the US are very much an exception. Having parents that went to an Ivy League or going to one of their expensive "feeder" schools is the best indicator of whether you can get into an Elite US university.
I never said that wasn't the case, just as it is obviously the case at Oxbridge. Making misleading comments about US schools using parental income directly in admissions decisions doesn't help fix any of that.
Again, OP claimed that top US schools directly ask your income in applications, implying this information was used directly in admissions decisions. It is not, and any admissions tests Oxbridge uses certainly have similar issues of correlation with wealth.
They claim to be "need blind", but they still ask. I'm not sure when they started that policy, but a quick search claims they are only one of 5 schools that claim to be "need blind".
That is need blind for internationals, which is quite rare. Need blind for domestic students is a long list which you can see here, and includes basically every school that one would call "top": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need-blind_admission
They ask for the information at the same time as the application so that aid packages can be offered in a timely fashion. It can take months to process everything, and students need to know the cost far enough before the decision deadline to weigh their options.
The financial aid office operates entirely separately from the admissions office at MIT, and I'm sure this is the case at other schools that claim to be need blind. Need blind has a clear definition, and there are legal implications to being a need blind school (for domestic students) in the US. It isn't just some marketing thing.
To your point about indirect economic discrimination, I'll note MIT is very clearly the best Ivy+ at admitting low income students: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...
That doesn't mean there isn't still a long way to go, but MIT is for sure not using need information in their admissions decisions, and if anything actively tries to not just take a ton of elite private school kids.
Actually, the next step probably will be to stop need blind admissions so that parental income can more explicitly be used to correct for disparity in opportunity.
Surprisingly, Texas is a real outlier here. Most states have some last resort college you can attend, but it's usually a community college, or AS degree institution.
UT Austin is a really good school from what I hear.
UT-Austin has an enrollment of 40K in a state with almost 350,000 high school grads in 2021. It is in no way a 'last resort' college and is in fact at the top of the UT system in terms of exclusivity and admission requirements. There are a variety of other UT campuses around the state with lower admission requirements and a similarly lower academic ranking. You are correct that Texas is an outlier though, it has one of the lowest graduation rates in the country.
>One thing that I found noteworthy when applying was also the fact that, for Cambridge, the admissions process had two phases: The first was academic acceptance. Those application forms made absolutely no mention of money. After a student has been academically accepted, there is a second phase in the application process that involves application to scholarships and ends with the applicant having to provide proof that they have the required funds to sustain themselves through the study period.
As far as I can tell this only applies to graduate students, and possibly those from overseas (and other weird edge cases
like people studying for a second undergraduate degree). If you apply as an 18-year-old from a British high school, you automatically get a loan from the government for tuition fees, can choose to borrow more to cover some of your living expenses, and will be given money by the university or your college if you come from a low-income family. You never have to show proof of funds, because the university will make sure you can afford to go.
Do you think universities still offer knowledge otherwise not accessible anywhere else?
I mean, there are courses that require "hands on" experience and guidance, but for things like IT, how uni is any better than e.g. Udemy, free lectures from around the world and meetups?
I think going to university is a luxury. It is a luxury I personally enjoyed having in my life. It is a luxury I want my children to be able to enjoy one day. It makes your life richer in the same way that, say, having horses makes your life richer, or sailing around the world in a yacht.
Of course there are people who don't enjoy horses. Or yachts. And not enjoying university should be seen as being no different.
If you look at them as an investment, I don't think they're a particularly good one.
And I think that this cycle of runaway inflation with regard to academic credentials as a prerequisite for jobs that don't actually require them is something that should be stopped.
When I was doing CS we had a lecture course on Pi calculus with very extensive hand written notes, because it was a field still very much in development and there was no textbook.
I think there is a lot to be said for taking a degree which lends an element of structure not chosen by you. Sometimes you need to learn the stuff that doesn’t interest you to have a foundation to really understand the stuff that does, and you might find there are other things you had never been interested enough in to even consider which will turn out to be really interesting.
On top of that I think tuition in small groups is much better than I’ve seen any meetup group manage. I’ve organized it once at a previous employer to help get some our application developers to the point where they could work on the our core vm and database, and I think they found it helpful being able to ask questions and talk over where exercises had given them trouble.
Competent teachers with time for you and a body of advice (students, who have most definitely understood the material in the way it was offered if they are ahead of you) that isn't full of nonsense. There is something to be said for self-study when it comes to IT (I've learned significantly more on my own than at school), but it takes a lot of being able to recognise bullshit. That's not compatible with a lot of folks when they want to study.
I have been lucky enough to have some of my university courses taught by some luminaries in their field. Most of them have taught me a framework for thinking as well as their course, not to mention being able to transmit some of their passion and love for curiosity. There is so much more besides lessons at the university, I would not even compare any video course with it honestly.
I have very similar experience as the author. I come from a small town in a poor country. On top of it's culturally inappropriate to brag about oneself. My first years living in a big city in North America was very hard on me. Everyone is at the center of the universe. Everyone is just too cool, too savvy and so high opinion about themselves to be friend with someone like me.
After couple of years, now I can see through the BS and the whole high self-esteem culture behind it. North America is a very unique culture where having a (often unrealistic) high opinion about oneself is seen as virtue. Immigrants like me, who are not familar with North American cultural schtick, can easily fall for the whole high self-esteem ruse.
20 years later all I could remember from Uni was Drink, Drink and Drink. LOL
All the people I know who interviewed for OxBridge were so god damn clever and smart I sometimes ( even til this day ) think whether they are human or not. They could learn a new subject far quicker than I do. And spend more time doing other mostly creative things. But nearly all of them ( at least those I knew ) quit their high paying job for something much simpler, Teaching, Fitness Training, Art or Traveling.
And In my opinion I dont think Cambridge is in anyway similar to Oxford about posh people. Although a lot of comments seems to think otherwise.
IIRC, the "Up!" film/documentary series kind of showed the way these people diverged. It's ages since I watched that series, but it was incredibly fascinating.
"The Shepherd's Life" is a great book, especially if you know the landscape he's farming. It's only a shame that you've now got a spoiler in discovering that he was so very clever and went to Oxford. Otherwise his is one of the rare stories of lives we tend not to read about.
As an Oxford alumni, I would personally focus on this more: "But Oxford wasn’t like that. The teaching was personalised, flexible and interactive. That kind of system keeps people like me in the room, fired up and engaged. Kids like me, who don’t flourish in school, can benefit from such attention, and focus, and belief. A good society would strive to give it to them."
Oxford provides an amazing environment if you genuinely want to learn and improve and the university actually seems to care about you succeeding. The time I spent there remain a decade later some of the most enjoyable in my life.
I suppose that Oxford and Cambridge might be a poor example since I went to Warwick, still a top-5 uni (depending on who you ask ;-) and found the people there to be very welcoming to me, as someone also from a London Comp and a working class family. I was treated as an equal, although I was also 2 years older than most others so that gained me some respect.
There is a deeper issue for sure, which is related to the relevance of University education in many sectors. Medical, legal, humanities probably still belong there since there is a large breadth of knowledge as well as many years of precedence to learn.
For engineering, most people would probably be better off learning on the job, perhaps with day release to college. I found my Electrical Engineering degree far inferior to my college-level Engineering training and more suitable for those who plan to enter research rather than most of us who just wanted a good job.
What I learned from going to university, after growing up as a working class child, was, don't play predefined games.
Those people with academic parents/relatives will all come prepared. They will drink more than you at parties and still ace their exams without any problems.
Your best chance of success are ways of life that aren't easily prepared for, because it levels the field.
> No one asked whether these students were really the most intelligent people.
Right, it only confirmed that they met the minimum standards of the University and had graduated. It was never about "most intelligent", but merely met a minimum requirement of knowledge and intelligence.
And there are plenty of people who fail to meet that requirement, but despite what they say about "college level iq", most people can pass if they work at it.
After all that, the author still manages to go back to their "us vs them" thinking, too. They're still looking down on people who weren't raised like they were.
There is a shift from university for its own sake, back to skilled work in making things. A more rational motivation.
I was far too often, far too much like the arrogant snots the author encountered at university; I had been conditioned to be the smartest guy in the room. But I was passionate about computers and the engineering that had created them, and I worked hard. Not sure that the space I was taking up would have had more benefit to someone else.
> I look at bookshop shelves and wonder where half the stories are. Where’s the book by the girl that works in the laundrette, the man who serves you in McDonalds, the Romanian woman who cleans your hotel room, by the lads that work on the railways or the building site? We don’t care about these people enough because they don’t get heard, and they don’t get heard because we build a success machine that they don’t want to be part of, or can’t access, or use, or afford.
This is a strange sentiment.
How many girls working in laundrettes, or men working at McDonalds, or lads working on the railways, or especially Romanian women who clean hotel rooms, can and do write quality fiction or non-fiction in their spare time and submit it to publishers? Sure, some authors have come from working-class background and had all sorts of menial jobs in their youth, which has made their books all the more interesting; but they also had something else. They had a rare sort of imagination, a love of the written word, an incredible drive to write, and a skill they had developed through continuous writing. At least the posh class is required to read and is instructed in writing as part of their education; so it's easier for the talented among them to discover their talents.
I think that's the point. The education for working-class people does not encourage imagination, writing (or even reading) for pleasure. The state school system is designed to turn out conforming factory workers (literally - that's what it was founded to do).
How many Einsteins spent their lives working in a coal mine because that's the only thing that their entire upbringing prepared them for?
So if you are a self motivated CS type of person considering what kind of education is available to you and that "socializing" is not your panacea, is there any alternative to the traditional college?
Would Bill Gates still drop out of Harvard these days?
There are still many ways to complete a college education. At best, college can teach you about rigour and timely topics that are both worthwhile and necessary for independent study. Some shortcuts to these could be, e.g., to work as an undergraduate research assistant.
Another option is VC type of funding. If you already have the chops to be convincing and work on relevant topic, places like Thiel Fellowship or YC might give you alternative approaches to learning.
As for Gates I do not know. In general, I would assume that the value of a university degree has only declined since then.
I'm currently reading Taleb's Antifragility book and he strikes a similar tune: The education system being little more than a way to cement social status, with actual innovation and entrepreneurship largely taking place outside it. Wealth leads to education, not the other way around.
I find this topic fascinating and it makes me see discussions about underfunded education systems and universities from a different angle.
Innovation and Entrepreneurship are supposed to take place outside of academia. Core research is the mission of academia. The research that doesn’t have the immediate returns or value capture to justify starting a company around. Some exceptions where academics launch businesses from their research but those are exactly that, exceptions.
"Wealth leads to education". This is how it used to be. The "Liberal" Arts were named so as the sort of people who studied them had freedom from normal labour.
Then came the push in the 80s to 00s to get more working class kids into higher education, so they could have the same opportunities as upper class folk, thinking education leads to wealth. Instead we've just ended up with a bunch of working class kids graduating to become baristas.
Education doesn't lead to real wealth. University educated higher professionals still go back to their middle class home to open a carton of orange juice.
Having started a business recently, I've realised how much I didn't need anything I learned at uni to do this.
> Then came the push in the 80s to 00s to get more working class kids into higher education, so they could have the same opportunities as upper class folk, thinking education leads to wealth. Instead we've just ended up with a bunch of working class kids graduating to become baristas.
How much of this is just being stuck in old mindsets?
I went to an expensive private school with lots of rich people and just 1 student chose a program outside of business, engineering, or medicine and we were far from a science school. It was clearly understood that arts was a path to serving coffee. A school that arguably had more people win essay/book competitions than science fairs produced nobody in those areas.
In university, I met tons of people who thought that having a degree alone opened up a pile of job options. They were 20 years behind the mindset of my private school.
It is now that certain education leads to wealth and plenty of people are doing education which does not.
Eh, a lot of folks forget that the shift to the liberal arts after the 50s had a lot to do with a surplus of engineers (and relatively lower salaries for their capabilities) and the desire to get into corporate management positions, which was a reasonable ambition before the popularity of MBAs and business programs.
Boomer here. A number of my professors (at a so-so school in the US West) came from at best lower middle class families and went through college on the GI Bill. One of the better ones had been something like a signalman in the Navy, another (a star from whom I never took a class) did enlisted service in the USAAF, I think.
Alvin Kernan, who had a long career in academia, wrote in the early pages of his memoir In Plato's Cave of the influx of men like himself, attending college on the GI Bill in the late 1940s.
I haven't read the book, but have often heard that trope - did he write about actual research into the topic?
I ask because in the fields I'm familiar with many innovative approaches are actually university spin-offs.
Edit: The point of this beautiful article, "a society that is blind to the potential of so many of its young people, is a wasteful, unfair and ineffective society" is a sad truth, but in my opinion the answer is openening the institution up, not abolishing it. Those people didn't learn middle class behaviour in universities, they were socialized with it since birth. Good, widely available public education is an effective means to level out this class-based inequality.
Same. The yearly local value added from eship alone at the university I work at is in the 200-300M+ USD/CHF range. The global value added is significantly higher.
I imagine that technical universities, like ETHZ/EPFL, have a much larger annual impact
"I can see why people are sceptical about universities, and angry at the elite ones. They are often now little more than training camps for the stormtroopers of capitalism."
Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological arguments - it just leads to generic ideological flamewars, which we're trying to avoid here.
Ah I see your mistake. You assumed my comment referred to a system different to capitalism operating in a country that less than 1% of the people on Hacker News live in.
An easy mistake to make. Happens to me all the time. I see people talking about troop landings in WW2, and I instantly assume they’re referring to the Japanese invading China. Whoops. I’m so silly
Whoa. Calm down. a) I'm not in China, and yes it would be reasonable to mention Chinese economic progress lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty by shifting towards a capitalist economic model under Deng Xiaoping, starting around 1979.
b) I said nothing of the sort about the current system in mainland China being 'good', or the CCP being a 'good thing' (I would be the last person to say something like that about a communist party anywhere), so stop putting words in my mouth and don't make it personal. Capitalism has objectively propelled China's economy to where it is now and made it overwhelmingly more prosperous than it was before they tried it.
Could you develop that point? I went to a northern comprehensive; I now lecture CS, but I have no recollection of being 'stepped on' by the Tarquins and Glorias of this world along the way -- in fact, I always felt that it is they who should be worried if they try. You may have some self esteem issues, mate.
I do have self-esteem issues, good catch, but I doubt my getting therapy would do much about already underpaid workers whose bosses are raking in bonuses while signing off on orders to furlough them, for example.
Ok. This sounds like a bit of a change of subject, but I think I follow. This all sounds a bit general: which 'underpaid workers' (and what is 'underpaid'?), which bosses, and how much are they 'raking in', is it illegal? You need to be more precise to diagnose a problem.
More importantly -- what are these people of whom you speak doing about improving their condition? Are they demanding a raise? You have my sympathy if you are the one stuck with an unreasonable employer and feel that you are underpaid: my advice would be to look for a new job and tell your employer where to go once you've found one.
However, if you are not in that category -- I have to say that I've never found the altruistic Guardianista (there -- I've said it!) approach to economic problems to be at all credible. It all smacks of some perverse neo-Christian moralising about what's 'fair' and 'good'. You can nearly always tell that an economic argument is lost when people start speaking about morality. If you want to go to Heaven, you're welcome. Me -- I'd rather go to Disneyland : at least it's actually there (besides, I've never been before).
Speaking about legality is so much better than speaking about morality, yes? It's convenient, sure, but that's about all it is. If you want a more 'precise' example, here's a thread from just yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27319477
> More importantly -- what are these people of whom you speak doing about improving their condition? Are they demanding a raise?
Not at all, I'm sure they just roll over and "let themselves be sacked" because that's how it works? Saying "just get a job where you're treated fairly" is extremely reductive. Said jobs wouldn't exist if the people employed in them were already happy with readily available non-"exploitative" jobs elsewhere.
I wasn't aware we were making economic arguments- after all your original comment ended asking whether it was immoral. Not economically unviable, not illegal. Immoral. Anyway, I'm not really looking for credibility, and my moral compass isn't tied to faith or organized religion, but your point is taken. Perhaps I am too, call it unrealistic or idealistic, for your taste. You're going to believe people like me invent problems to compensate for our failures, and I'm going to believe people like you overlook problems because they have found or earned enough to have the luxury to. We're not going to agree here and I'm not really interested in changing your mind. Have a nice day.
> Speaking about legality is so much better than speaking about morality, yes?
It isn't better, nor is it worse; it is merely more objective, that's all.
> I wasn't aware we were making economic arguments- after all your original comment ended asking whether it was immoral.
Yes, sorry, that was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but you're quite right on this count. I was simply attempting to rubbish an anti-capitalist argument in the article, but it blew up in my face.
> Perhaps I am too, call it unrealistic or idealistic, for your taste.
That's ok. Who's to say which one of us is 'right'? We can just say that we have profound disagreements about the merits of capitalism as an economic system -- I think that's fair and it shouldn't be a problem in a democracy.
> I'm going to believe people like you overlook problems because they have found or earned enough to have the luxury to.
You believe that if it gives you any comfort. For now, I'll just continue believing that "economics is the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses" and leave it at that.
That's because you know you cannot compete. Ironically, this kind of crab-in-the-bucket egalitarianism is a form of selfish self-interest on your part.
I'm 'competing' plenty by staying afloat and providing for my family every single day, thank you very much. And yes, sure. Call it what you want, but I don't want myself or anyone to have to 'compete' to prove their worth.
I went to school in Seattle and had a Singaporean trustfund baby friend who always reiterated “everyone deserves to get a masters degree”. She would constantly fly to different cities every weekend on her own (parent’s) dime to volunteer for this non profit org called AIESEC. “Everyone deserves to travel.” To this day, I still don’t understand what this org does and it sounded like a cult or some kind of pyramid scheme. If you can’t explain what your org does in less than a paragraphs… it’s fluff to me. One concrete thing this student ran org did was help other students get internships, and yet ironically my friend never secured one herself. After her parents spent half a million on her tuition, room and board, she ended up going to a 3rd world country to become a tech recruiter making a fraction of US minimum wage. Now, instead of “everyone should get a masters degree”, it’s “everyone should contribute to the developing world”.
I'm having trouble understanding the point of your story. It sounds like you don't think very highly of this friend. Does she know you talk about her this way?
After graduating from the Czech Technical University I realized that
1. I am much less special then I thought
2. There is much more hard working focused average people then the few talented superstars, both usually achieving the same
3. Surprisingly many of the exceptionally smart people in my social bubble, some of them graduated from the best universities in the world, "left the system" and focus on doing creative small thing's in their everyday life, instead of pursuing their parents dreams
4. Work, life, and social structure is extremely unfair
5. I will do my best to teach my kinds to strive for understanding, a love for beauty and a complexity of the world, instead of focusing on grades and stuff
6. The two guys I knew, who attended Oxf. and Camb. were both fired because they were more talk then action. Not a representative sample though. Just ruining my illusion.