Crossing continents again
I’ll be in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley from August 4 - August 13. I will be hitting SES in San Jose from the 8th - 11th, and getting up to nothing but fun and trouble the whole time. Wanna hook up? Email me. I always meet so many interesting people when I come to the area, and have high hopes for this trip, too.
NB Chris Yeh was one of the fantastic, clever, curious, witty (and cute! And fragrant! And! And! And!) people I met last month, over delicious Chinese food at Ming’s in Palo Alto, and his post on the pros and cons of Silicon Valley is great. (I must also add that one of the reasons I can’t take Tom Coates too seriously is because he is fiercely intelligent, and yet seems to think free markets are a bad thing; despite saying that he is “quite keen” on them, the kind of ‘free market’ he’s “quite keen” on is one where the government makes laws to ‘protect’ people.)
Filed under: Business, Fun, Life, People I Know, Search Engine Marketing, Technology
I hope you’ll be paying us a visit in So Cal!
Yup. Absolutely. Because I think there is a minimum standard of treatment that human beings deserve and should be guaranteed by law, and I don’t believe that free markets alone supply them. Also there’s a role for goverment in looking after free markets to make sure that they remain free - for example, by making sure that monopolist practices don’t take over markets and make consumers lives unpleasant. And I also believe that companies are relentlessly short-termist when it comes to a whole bunch of issues, and that the free market can only deal in the long term with questiosn like the environmental impact and by that time it may be too late. I absolutely believe in the power of the market to encourage people to be creative, and to weed out inefficiencies and to encourage competition and development. But any system is gameable, all are prone to abuse, and when the players are all real people with real lives I do think you need to have some constraints in place outwith the system to make sure that things we believe to be morally appropriate aren’t routinely contravened in the pursuit of blind cash.
My sense of human beings is that this business rhetoric of the blind survival of the fittest is actually a profoundly wrongheaded understanding of economics, human nature and darwinism. Humans are successful because they are social and co-operative. If this were not the case, we wouldn’t live in communities, engage in cities, have learned language and have formulated a whole bunch of social constraints like laws and manners and politics to work out how best we can co-operate with one another. The market is one element - and a profoundly imported abstracted element - of that social system. It’s an environment with rules and edges (selling human beings is illegal pretty much everywhere now) that seems to be the best way to handle a whole range of exchanges and interactions. It may or may not be the best way to handle a nation’s medical care.
Most of my comments on the free market are actually about comparing Europe and the US and pointing out the different accomodations that the regions have made between social justice and free market economics. Continental Europe tends to lean quite heavily towards social justice and interventionist politics, the US tends strongly against that and the leftist parties are pretty as right wing as European right-wing governments. Interestingly, the UK tends to sit almost exactly between the two on a whole range of issues. My suggestion would be that each has come to an accomodation which they feel works for them, and that no system is ideal - continental Europe is relatively inefficient, the US functions partly because it has a massive amount of natural resources to exploit and partly because it has an enormous and often illegal underclass to exploit. It’s as easy to point to America’s successes and failures as it is to point to Europe’s. Neither wins on points - they’ve simply found difference balance points somewhere between a world that works perfectly efficiently with a world that seems to offer a reasonable standard of living, education and opportunity to its citizens. I suspect unbridled capitalism and perfectly free markets in all things would be as disasterous and inhuman as totalitarian communism proved to be.
This has been a really long comment, and I apologise for that, but it’s a fascinating subject for me - particularly as I’m spending a lot of time in the US recently and have seen a lot of clumsy short-termist thinking - I call it strip-mining - where you find an idea or a territory and you don’t look towards sustainable income or building a product that lasts and grows, you just make something htat will be tremendously short-term profitable and will burn out in a month. The rhetoric of US business seems to me to actually often be in direct opposition to the ideals of an enlightened free market.
Tom, thanks for your comment (I’m not bothered by length). I must say, though, that “I think there is a minimum standard of treatment that human beings deserve and should be guaranteed by law” pretty much illustrates my point. I can respect that belief, wrongheaded though I think it is, but it does go some way to explaining why I find your other musings on business and technology to be lacking. I’m sure you will lose exactly zero sleep over this!
Your generalisations about “US business” based on recent observations of flipmeat mania will have to be tackled when I’m less bothered by the heat…Cheers.
Hm. Well while I would have obviously preferred it if we could have agreed to disagree on this issue, I’m quite comfortable with the way you’ve framed our disagreement. And if you truly believe what you indicate you do (and to the extent that you say), then I feel I can respond (although I would prefer not to) in the same kind of language that you use with me. I think your position is profoundly wrong-headed, but also at first glance dangerous and weirdly idealistic in a particularly cynical kind of way. That is you seem to believe something quite tooth-and-claw about humanity but simultaneously put enormous faith in its ability to produce utopia through the simplest of abstracted systems.
If this is what you believe, it seems to place you rather far to the right of even American politics - certainly way past anyone who would agree any necessity for social security, financial support for people on the brink of poverty, a communally owned road infrastructure or in public education. As such, although I’m in no way disputing that you strongly believe in and could argue for your positions, at first glance this places you at such an extreme end of world politics and in such a tiny minority that it’s difficult to take your confident assurances that you’re right on faith. I’d need more evidence to convince me of such a position.
I hope you understand - while no-one likes their arguments to be called wrong-headed or lacking, I do like it when my beliefs are challenged and where I can assess alternative positions and see if they are more effective or model the world more closely. But I do need to be convinced.
Tom, that you think minarchism is ‘right-wing’ tells me that any attempt to discuss this with you is going to be an exercise in frustration for the both of us. (Indeed, I think the embrace by those calling themselves ‘left-wing’ of those who would have gay people and rape victims stoned to death is as much proof as is needed that concepts of what is ‘right-wing’ and what is ‘left-wing’ are completely meaningless.)
Race riots (by the immigrants) in France. Let me see…. I blame rampant capitalism.
Molotov cocktails thrown through the windows of an office belonging to the governing party in Marseille? Let me see… I blame Wal-Mart.
Unemployment levels in France double those of the USA? Let me see… I blame George Bush for cutting taxes.
Guess in which country health care spending is lower, charity giving is lower, it is illegal to wear a scarf on one’s head at school, you can be arrested for leaving your ID card in your car or home, you can’t become a freelance journalist without a permit, and provides rent-free accommodation for the cannibal Bokassa, formerly Emperor of the Central African Republic?
France and the rest of Europe have their strong points, but people who talk of “balance” should check the number of French youths working in the USA versus the number of Americans fleeing to Europe to find jobs.
“Social security” is neither.
Actually, the people you call ‘liberals’ are anything but.
To the liberals gentleman - you’d have to read my post pretty strangely to come to the conclusion that I’m being anti-American or that I’m stating that capitalism is a problem. My argument is simply that total free market environments (or which the US is not one) have a bunch of problems, as do governmentally interventionist environments - and that the consequences of choosing your country’s particular place down that spectrum always have some negative points - whether that be a limited failure in competition and innovation or reprehensible social policies. I have no interest in defending Europe except to say that the citizenry have slightly different priorities than in Europe and build towards them. Some will be successful. Some will not. But in fact this argument is not about US versus Europe it’s about highly polarised positions - which, if we’re honest, neither the US or Europe are. They only look dissimilar because many of the truly different regimes are self-dismantling.
With regards to the emigration issue - I think I’m afraid we’ll just have to disagree on that one. There are a number of issues involved in looking at US versus European competitiveness over the last seventy years or so, including massive disparities in natural resources, rebuilding after conflicts, war debts and a massive polyphony of language. I’m not prepared to accept that it’s as simple as saying there are two different systems and one is more successful. That would reduce the debate to an almost trivial level.
To Jackie - I didn’t say minarchism was right-wing any more than I said minarchism was a fish. I didn’t talk about minarchism at all. I said the idea of a totally free market was a right wing idea, and so it is. I go with the old graph with two axes - economically interventionist versus free market (left - right) and socially authoritarian versus socially libertarian as the other. I’m quite comfortable to say that I’m on the free market side of any left-right split, but not to the far right of it, and I would tend to be towards the libertarian side of any authoritarian / libertarian split as well. In fact I doubt our politics is enormously different, except in as much as I wouldn’t go as far as you are prepared to towards the maximal dismantling of social security or whatever.
I’m interested in how you reconcile your minarchism with the idea of a totally free market. Presumably you believe in governmentally produced infrastructure like roads? That would seem to be against a total free market, but in concert with minarchism. Presumably management of the money supply to a certain extent you believe to be a centralised activity - also some element of army, police and public schooling. Presumably you also believe that there needs to be mechanisms outwith the free market that are designed to protect it - for example to stop monopolist abuses. Do you believe in taxation to fund any of these functions? I don’t see how you can quite reconcile any of these functions with a perfect free market.
Personally, of course, I believe in some constraints on business in and above these things. But that’s not really the question at the moment. The question is whether or not you believe in a free market without any laws that protect people at all, which I cannot believe that you do.