But again, you’re attributing your own personal values to things, when there is no evidence that your values are actually virtuous from some universal long-term standpoint.
Again, you’re talking about things like possible long term effects from things like fossil fuel use, but since those effects are ultimately undefined, you can’t actually incorporate those effects into any system in a rational manner.
In terms of the old argument of people who inherit wealth as not really “deserving” it… this is certainly true, in some cases. Look at someone like Paris Hilton. When she inherits her fortune, she will likely waste it, because she is an imbecile. But you know what happens then? That wealth leaves her, and goes to other people who deserve it more. That’s how the system corrects itself.
Now, you could also have the case where someone inherits wealth, and as a result of their privilege, they become educated and successful, some captain of industry or whatever, and continue to make more money. Bill Gates would be a good example, I suppose. Gates came from a reasonably wealthy family, and then went on to become the richest man in the world. Some may say, “See? The rich get richer!”
But even if Bill Gates had advantages compared to many when he started out, that doesn’t change the fact that his efforts dramatically benefited the entire planet… Even leaving out his pretty amazing philanthropic manner as of late, even when he was just a cutthroat business man he changed the world we lived in. He had vision, and he realized it. The fact that he had advantages in making those good things happen does not in any way minimize the overall results. And the market based system is what ultimately enabled that progress and innovation to take place.
I think we are often prone to think that such things are bad, or at least only neutral.
But the reality is that their bet benefited society. Their willingness to risk their own wealth on an idea gave some company a chance to realize their dream, which was then ultimately deemed worthy by the market. You have to be willing to reward that risk taking, because without it, you’ll stifle innovation by limiting the resources it can tap into.
Was windows really that unique? My impression of Bill Gates is that he was great at seizing opportunities, co-opting work, and spreading his company’s software, but not an innovator… but the take over of Windows/Dos was just before my time.
Even if we let slide, you know all the other people that make microsoft’s software, did Windows as a platform offer something unique which changed the world or was it just Gates’ ruthless business tactics which made it the defacto platform for desktop computers?
There’s advantages to having a single OS for a majority of desktop computers, but that isn’t unique to microsoft software.
See, what I’m saying here is that the government, no matter how representatively elected, is not capable of efficiently determining price as well as the market. It simply moves far to slow. Additionally, your voting for someone does not mean that they understand and can act upon how you would act in the market. Just because we elect people does not mean that they are then able to just replace us in some decision making process about price.
Price is not the only thing valued by society.
Well, yes, it rewards decisions that make money. Currently, hedge fund managers are very profitable, but they do serve SOME function to how the economy functions, despite the fact that as an investor I often don’t like them.
No, not really. Criminals who make their living by breaking and entering exist and can be profitable, that doesn’t mean they “serve some function.” It’s entirely possible the hedge fund managers are 100% economic loss.
Agreed, but honestly, you can have a market based system in which the rewards for success are not 1000, 10,000, or 100,000 times the money of a reasonably successful middle class plumber or white collar worker.
But they do serve a function, just as short sellers serve a function in the stock market. They seem like sharks who are just out to ruin everyone’s day by betting on the no-pass line in a game where the bets affect the outcome, but the reality is that they tend to improve the efficiency of the overall market.
Agreed, but honestly, you can have a market based system in which the rewards for success are not 1000, 10,000, or 100,000 times the money of a reasonably successful middle class plumber or white collar worker.
Well, ultimately I’m more concerned about how much I make, than I am about whether or not someone else makes more than me. The only time that matters is if they’re buying the same stuff I am, and drive the price up. But as far as I know, the super rich aren’t having an inflationary effect upon the overall market.
Frankly, Windows wasn’t unique at all. Windows was essentially stolen from Xerox’s PARC facility. He stole it from them, just as Steve Jobs did. (which was funny when Jobs then accused Gates of stealing the ideas from him, at which point it came out that they had both stolen them from Xerox)
Gates wasn’t a technical genius, just like Jobs isn’t a technical genius. What they had was vision of what could be done with technology. Xerox had developed a GUI based computer in the 70’s, which basically had everything that the Mac eventually showcased in 1985. But Xerox’s management said that no one would use something called a “mouse”, and that they didn’t want to bother getting into computers because, and I quote, “We make copiers.” Most people think that if Xerox had pursued the technology developed by the geniuses at PARC, they’d own the entire computer industry now. They’d be some kind of weird combination of IBM and Microsoft, and Apple wouldn’t exist. But they lacked the vision, and so they sucked.
Even if we let slide, you know all the other people that make microsoft’s software, did Windows as a platform offer something unique which changed the world or was it just Gates’ ruthless business tactics which made it the defacto platform for desktop computers?
Well, Gates got IBM into a pretty sweet deal (for MS, not for IBM), where DOS was supplied on every IBM PC. Indeed, it HAD to be supplied with it. So, this gave microsoft an automatic in with every PC sold. I knew some guys who were in the OS/2 division of IBM, and they were pissed off since they had made an operating system which easilly trounced Windows in every way, but eventually lost out to it simply because MS had such a competitive advantage even on machines made by IBM themselves.
Gates was a ruthless businessman with a great vision… and while a lot of his moves can be viewed as cut-throat and mean, ultimately he changed the face of computing, and he changed it into something that is infinitely better than it was.
Again, he changed the face of computing? I’ll just have to disagree. If all he did was make a neutral change, that wasn’t an innovation, but rather just one of many competitors that could have easily filled that role as far as progress is concerned, then I wouldn’t call that changing the face of computing.
It makes Gates a great businessman, but not an innovator.
Edit: Yes, I agree Gates had vision, his vision was that it was his company’s software that would be on every computer. That’s hardly an innovative vision. That’s the vision of every business owner, that they would hopefully be successful or dominate their industries. This isn’t the vision of some great inventor whose discovery changed the way we lived.
Innovation isn’t simply invention. You need the smart guys to invent cool stuff, but it takes an innovative businessman to get the technology to the market.
But perhaps we’re just arguing semantics now. Folks like Gates and Jobs can be compared to their peers at Xerox, and you can clearly see the difference. Gates and Jobs saw what the technology could be when given to the mass market, and that is what led us to where we are today. It’s easy to say, “Well, that would happen anyway… someone else would have done it,” but that’s not really how it works. Hindsight is 20/20, and everything always seems obvious after it’s been done… but it’s not. The idea of putting computers into everyone’s home is something that wasn’t always considered to be the obvious outcome.
That’s not what I’m saying. If there were contemporary competitors looking to supply software for desktop computers, then it wasn’t Gates’ unique vision. Was it Gates that sold IBM on the idea of desktop computers in every home?
You’re attributing to Gates a much greater role than he probably played. That’s my point and yours seems mostly just based on his wealth and the ubiquitousness of Microsoft software.
Gates changed the face of computing so it was infinitely better than it was?
That seems like a pretty outlandish claim. How was Microsoft software infinitely better than other software at the time that could have been used on desktops?
It’s an honest question, as I got my own personal computer after MSDOS was basically ubiquitous. I don’t know what the landscape of its competitors looked like at the time or whether their competing products were really that terrible.
Again, “serve a function” or “someone will pay you to do it” is not the same as “net beneficial to society.” The mafia paying its foot soldiers to steal shit off trucks is profitable.
Yeah, sort of in line with Jason’s post, I’d question whether efficiency, in itself, should be considered much of a virtue. I would argue that overvaluing efficiency is what leads to monopolies and oligopolies. I’d also evoke Nassim Taleb’s fragility vs. robustness argument (a system with plenty of redundancy is robust, and can thus better survive unforeseen cataclysms than an efficient, super-specialized system (see too big to fail)).
We had all our best business schools in the United States pouring out financial engineers, every smart young mathematician and physicist said ‘I don’t want to be a civil engineer, a mechanical engineer. I’m a smart guy, I want to go to Wall Street.’ And then you know all the risks were going to be sliced and diced and [people thought] the market would be resilient and not face any crises. We took care of all that stuff, and I think that was the general philosophy that markets are efficient and self correcting and we don’t have to worry about them too much.
Microsoft’s software wasn’t infinitely better than other software at the time… although, keep in mind, there really wasn’t a lot of software back then. It wasn’t really a mass-market commodity like it is now.
DOS wasn’t some kind of magical new thing. I think you get this on some level, in that Microsoft didn’t achieve what they achieved through creation of awesomely new technology. But they did in fact play a driving role in getting to where we are now… and really, how could anyone argue otherwise, when over 90% of all PC’s are running MS’s software.
It’s possible that someone else would have done what MS did. Without MS, things would almost certainly be different than they are today. Perhaps better, or perhaps worse. I guess it’s impossible to tell.
They’d be about the same. Better, possibly, if one of the *nixes had become the standard OS.
Tim Paterson wrote MS-DOS. Bill Gates negotiated a favourable contract for selling it to IBM. The guy who did the productive work received something on the order of $75,000 for it, while the person who finagled a sharp contract received wealth in the billions. The free-marketer’s argument that, without the incentive of potentially earning all of those billions this productive work would never have taken place is manifestly untrue. If Gates had known that, at some point in the future he might have to pay an extra 5% on his income, Paterson never would have written MS-DOS… really? Can anyone possibly believe this? I agree that a taxation system which substantially harms incentives would reduce productive economic activity, but does anyone imagine that, facing a future in which he might only make 100 times as much off MS-DOS as Paterson did that Gates would never have bothered to get out of bed and so we’d all be stuck, in the year 2010, writing our own OSs anew in assembly every time we turned on a computer? “The market” says that Gates’ work is worth thousands of times more than Paterson’s work, but I think it takes a kind of stubborn blindness to obvious realities to refuse to see there might be something slightly irrational about the way that “the market” has made that decision.
