I haven't played a big-budget game in years, but I decided to give RDR2 a try, specifically because reviewers described it as slow and boring.
I think it's great, for the exact reason that other people think it's slow and boring. It's specifically designed to quash your tendency to speedrun or minmax: It requires you to simply come along for the ride.
On the one hand, this is a bit annoying sometimes. On the other hand, it revives the sense of wonder that I haven't felt since I learned to treat games as something to win rather than something to get lost in.
My main problem with the game was how willing it was to fail you on whatever your current objective was. For example, I passed a woman on the side of the road with a broken leg who needed help. Easy enough, I stopped and offered her a ride. She couldn't get on though because I had pelts on my horse. In the time it took me to walk back to my horse and drop the pelts, she'd yelled at me "Fine, I'll get home myself" and walked off, and wouldn't speak to me anymore. I've had similar experiences with several other side-encounters, and even main story missions where I had to replay 10 minutes of riding somewhere because I got off my horse midway to shoot a deer and failed out of the mission because of it.
Also, the controls are quite bad - it suffers from the "Rockstar Claw" just like all their other releases. Overall, I want to enjoy this game, and I love the characters and the immersiveness of the world they've crafted, but the game containing the world is hard to play.
Rockstar Claw is fixed via the ‘Standard FPS’ setting with toggle to run. You click the left thumbstick once to jog and twice to sprint just like FPS games like COD. Pulling fully in a direction sprints and just barely touching it walks. I liked the change but it felt weird and I worried that I would just run off every cliff I came to.
You need to mash A to run, but also need to keep a finger on the stick and the trigger, meaning you end up with your thumb on the stick, index on the A button, and middle on the trigger, creating an uncomfortable claw shape with your hand.
The newest Zelda is like that as well. I finished in a couple of weeks; my wife has been playing for almost a year and just finished the main quest. My daughter just enjoys exploring and cooking dishes with all the ingredients.
The attention to detail at every level is what makes it work as a free-world. I'd argue this aspect is better than the traditional main-quest story line and execution, but the entire game is an amazing experience.
I've never played a game that offered more enjoyment in simply moving around the world than in Zelda. Putting yourself in the headspace of climbing up mountains and paragliding for transportation is so fun.
Slow and boring is what sold me on it as well. Early on I was getting frustrated with having a bounty on my head but I've learned how to avoid that (stop committing crimes). Now, I slowly explore the map and occasionally complete a mission to move the story forward.
I feel the Internet has quashed my enjoyment of single player games ... it’s like I gotta have a multiplayer competitive at all times , if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears , Meh who cares not fun haha
Interestingly, the Internet has quashed my enjoyment of multiplayer games: so many people are playing them, there's no chance I am going to be able to compete, given that I only play occasionally. When "multiplayer" meant "lan party" or "friends come together and play a skirmish" you actually had a chance, but now? Not so much.
I really prefer single player games with a nice story and an action that's not too hectic that I can enjoy at my own pace.
This is why for me, Warcraft 3 and Starcraft were my fondest memories of playing online games. The standard multiplayer was always going to be competitive, but the real wonder was in the custom games. This was before the big wave of indie game creators, so you had a bunch of people churning out interesting and creative games with the WC3 editor. The custom games were most famous for DOTA, but you had genres like Tower Defense which blew up in a big way in the custom game scene.
You had maps like wilderness survival and troll tribes, which, if you've played Don't Starve, feels largely derivative. Footmen Frenzy, Dark Deeds, Sheep Tag, Uther Party (Mario Party ripoff), LAOP, Parasite, Mars Survival, Risk knockoffs, etc. It didn't matter if you sucked at these games, because most people sucked at them; the playerbase for each custom game was pretty small. A good time for novelty - I'm hoping reforged brings back some of that magic from that scene. I played LOL after moving on from Blizzard games (Wow was never my thing), but it wasn't the same. Also, very toxic. Not a great game for casual players.
As a debilitatingly asocial person (even online), I have the complete opposite position. I dislike the industry shift towards games that focus on multiplayer and sometimes don't even have a single-player mode.
While there is definitely a focus on multiplayer games ($$$ drives all things), these last few years have also yielded some of the most incredible single-player games. Major studios are investing in AAA primarily single-player titles (from this year alone, God of War, Spiderman, RDR2, Assassin's Creed Odyssey) and there is also an explosion of high quality indie titles.
As someone that almost never plays online except some occasional co-op with friends, I don't feel one bit neglected by the current state of the industry.
That is a shocking statement. You are there to hear the tree falling in the forest. Are you saying that your reason of playing video games is to get acknowledgement from others?
I find this shocking because it's incredibly in line with discussions and articles that claim that a large portion of younger men had been deprived by society from getting a sense of belonging and accomplishment and is now using video games as a bandaid for that.
This is a unfortunate statement, as there are many reasons to game. I'm guessing you havent really spent much time gaming. For me, the most important part of gaming for me is sharing time with my far-flung-friends. We're not watching a tree fall, we're building a campfire together. Sharing GTA5's space with 7 friends is much better than a group video call with the same crowd, for example. Acknowledgment from others doesn't even rank on the list of reasons why I game.
Yeah I think I was more getting at the 5 axis of game design, there’s people who’d like to :
Explore,
Socialize.
Challenge based game / rankings ,
Strategy / logic,
Forget other one
I’d say my tree falling in forest remark goes along two axis of social + challenge against other human brain . Almost same dopamine hit of telling a joke and getting reaction from crowd, feels fun to tell jokes similar to goofing off in multiplayer games etc
My only point was that there are many different motivations to game and ways to derive value from a gaming experience, my bad if I come off as holier than thou.
It's a fair sentiment and I don't think you deserve to get downvoted for expressing it. Years ago when I still had an Xbox 360, I remember Microsoft had implemented a system where all of your friends would be able to see your in-game achievements on Xbox live, even in single player games. I'd actually say it goes even farther back to the days of arcades: sure, it's fun to play arcade games on your own, but really you just wanted to beat your friends' high scores.
I don't feel that way about single player games, but I do find narrative based games less enjoyable than story-less games/story-poor games where the game play mechanisms are at the forefront: like Enter the Gungeon, the new XCOM, Prison Architect, Oxygen Not Included, KSP etc.
Games with stories and narratives feel like chores and are restrictive.
Yeah, I agree, form should follow function, not the other way around.
"This game allows you to pluck chickens / pay respects / become a porn star, that was never possible in a game before!!!", but it's really just that you can press a button to trigger an animation.
That's fun for a while, but seeing a bunch of games and programming a bit, it kinda becomes transparent and samey, and those little touches of realistic decoration are also reminders that they had time for that $animation, but not for this $mechanic. Some people see redheads and blondes and brunettes, I see committees.
Here's a crazy idea: Replace all models by their hitboxes and all textures single colors, remove all ambient sounds, remove all padding from dialogue and let NPC just name the variables they need to have met, and what variables that will set as a result, and so on. A game or a simulation would of course look and sound terrible, but it would still work, while a interactive movie kind of "experience" will be reduced to next to nothing.
Take chess for example, playing with beautiful weighty pieces is certainly more fun than with, say, pieces of paper with letters on them. But if you're good at chess and longing for a good game of chess, you would rather play against an opponent with a similar elo ranking as you with pieces of paper, than against a child or a random number generator with nice chess pieces.
We can rank sciences by "hardness" all day, but the thought of "hard gaming" seems oddly offensive, why? I also noted that no comments seem to reference the article, which is understandable since it's such a fluff piece. And none of the comments are pointing out any gameplay challenge, clever AI, nothing.
> After a few hours, you can almost feel the ego diminution, the sense of “merging with nature or the universe” that Michael Pollan describes in How to Change Your Mind. (And at $60 for a copy, Red Dead Redemption 2 is cheaper than psychedelic drugs.)
60$, then "a few hours" until that effect kicks in, and you become one with "nature and the universe" on the screen.
Just wow. I would feel insulted by that. That's such a low view of both the universe and the time of a person.
> The soundtrack helps, too. You hear sounds of nature, long ambient notes in the wilderness, or the Irish-influenced strain of an antique banjo from a nearby campfire. “We have 192 interactive mission scores, and we thought about the music constantly from the time we brought in [composer] Woody Jackson in 2015,” says Ivan Pavlovich, Rockstar’s music supervisor. “Sam was always asking early on, ‘What’s the feel [of the game]?’ ”
Oh yeah, telling people how to feel about things, what would a good game be without that, right?
> Rockstar’s goal is to “slip as much art under the hood without players noticing it — but they don’t have to notice it,” says Dan. If you want, you can bypass much of the story with just a tap of the controller. “It can just be mud, blood, and gore.”
Mud, blood and gore with cutscenes, or just mud, blood and gore... what about gameplay? All the immersion on the one hand, then slo-mo and auto-aim on the other, and plenty of chores to keep your stats up. A huge map, a million NPC with a few binary flags each, and hours of voice acting. What did I miss? All I heard on youtube is the same I read in this thread, "you can go fishing or hunting" ("move to location X and press button Y"), how it's so immersive and detailed, etc. etc., but nothing about solid gameplay.
So your own enjoyment of a game is meaningless unless someone knows you're enjoying it? I suppose that's your prerogative, but it sounds like we play games for different reasons.
The other day I saw that hour long gameplay video 2077 and it was mesmerizing. I can't wait to play it, will probably even upgrade my PC just for that game, but OTOH the world looks so immersive and deep I fear that I'd need a couple of weeks off.
I have a PS4, but if I can I prefer buying a game for PC.
In part because I have more control over the hardware, but specially because games do not die when a newer console model is released.
I can still play many PC games from 10+ years ago, but I have a box of PS3 discs that I cannot use because the PS4 does not have backwards compatibility. Some of those games have been ported to the PS4, and I'd have to buy them again to play them on the PS4. What will happen with the PS5?
Witcher 3 was the game that put me back to play games and I still love it and all its DLC. And after Witcher 3 game the new Zelda, which reimagined the whole idea of an open world adventure. Waiting for Cyberpunk 2077 now...
red dead redemption was slow as well, but much better paced. at the time, it seems the tech and general style of red dead redemption made a strong departure from gta iv. the gunplay was very fun in my opinion in red dead redemption. the euphoria physics engine was really fantastic. when i got gta v, it was surprising how sluggish and clunky the gameplay was. it seems they didn't keep or integrate any of the tech from red dead redemption. maybe they did, but it wasn't noticeable. gta v was faster paced, particularly the driving, than gta iv, but the gunplay was still the same old. i was worried that red dead redemption 2 would follow more in the footsteps of gta v than red dead redemption, and that seems to have been the case. the gunplay in red dead redemption 2 is noticeably sloppier and more clunky than in red dead redemption 2.
i played red dead redemption for hundreds of hours, both in single player and in the online multiplayer, which was a blast. i haven't even finished red dead redemption 2, and have found myself very bored with the story and side missions. it's the same formula rockstar has used for years, and the AI is as superficial as ever. it can be a real slog riding around between missions. even though the guns look great, they and the aiming system is not as fun as red dead redemption.
If you enjoyed the slower pace I'd recommend Kingdome Come: Deliverance [1]. It doesn't have the same level of polish or the production values of a Rockstar game, but really surprised me with it's realistic, historic, non-magical setting that actually brought something new to the familiar table of open world RPGs.
Oh man, there are so many hilarious threads buried in the Straight Dope archives. I have no idea how that forum managed to maintain such a high concentration of genuinely witty posters for so long, but it was a great crowd for years. (Might still be, I dunno.)
> Healthcare providers must likewise be required to publish their rates in a uniform format such as industry standard CPT codes or a percentage of Medicare rates.
This proposal does not address the primary reason that price transparency is really goddamn hard: Even if you know exactly what a provider will charge for each CPT code, you don't know which CPT codes are going to be billed for a particular patient care event.
Inconsistent cost per line item is not the key problem with transparency. Tools like Castlight actually do a pretty decent job of guessing how much each item on a provider's CPT "menu" is going to cost a patient. In many (most?) situations, it is simply not possible to predict which CPT codes are going to be billed for a particular patient's care. This is the key reason price transparency tools tend to give a range rather than a specific price for a particular procedure.
(Also: Big picture, the idea that this would decrease costs by 33% is absurd. If healthcare providers had to publish real legit price sheets that were used by real consumers, prices would converge within a market, but they would not converge that low. Published pricing is not going to cause these businesses to collectively roll over and give up 33% of their revenue.)
There are many factors contributing to this actually.
1. Doctors overprescribe because they are afraid of mistakenly underprescribing (we are a litigious country after all). This end up costing patients more tests/procedures, and cost doctors malpractice insurance premiums.
2. Procedures are billed differently per insurance policy. There are millions of variations of anthem PPO, and what they cover and how much they pay differs.
3. You, as the policy beneficiary, only care about your out of pocket cost. You don't really care about the price unless 1) you pay some percent of the money (reference pricing), 2) you are below your deductible.
So you are right, price transparency alone is not enough, but it is indeed a big step. If you knew in advance the price of thing, you probably wouldn't pay 400$ for a bag of saline solution [1]
> you probably wouldn't pay 400$ for a bag of saline solution
Hey, this is a great example: I might very well pay $400 for a bag of saline solution even if I knew the price in advance, because I don't care about the price of the bag. I care about the all-in cost of my treatment. If that total cost happens to include a $400 bag, I don't really care.
The "$30 Asprin" narrative sometimes misses the big picture of healthcare costs. The price of an apsrin or bag of saline solution is inflated to cover the enormous fixed costs of running a hospital with an ER. Could the ER charge $4 per bag or $0.25 per asprin? Of course, but if they lose their per-unit margin on the saline and asprin, they're going to jack up the price of some other CPT code because they have to cover their fixed costs somewhere.
that's a great point, and something that is actually telling about the us healthcare.
The 400$ saline bag is probably an illustrative example, but i believe it's a pretty common line item for most surgeries. I don't know enough about medical procedures, but i assume it's not one of the rare items/prescriptions where the high cost is somewhat justified.
I care about "all-in" cost of treatment. I don't see that. I don't see that until it's too late. I don't get charged for "all-in", i get charged per individual item in that "all-in" care i got.
It seems like it's good to be able to rebuild everything at a moment's notice after patching against a major exploit, though. You should have a fast way to rebuild secrets and servers after the next heartbleed-scale vulnerability.
Being able to rebuild critical infrastructure from source, and know that you'll be able to reliably deploy it, is a _huge_ win for security.
In that case, you might be interested in bosh: http://bosh.io/docs/problems.html (the tool that enables the workflow jacques_chester was describing). It embraces the idea of reliably building from source for the exact reasons you've mentioned.
I did a Show HN / feedback post for my startup almost nine years ago and got some very mixed feedback, but I felt that it was all well intentioned and at least somewhat reasonable.
Over time, it seems like the feedback for early stage startups on HN has become progressively more gratuitously negative.
In some cases, armchair critics have valid points, but I've gradually adopted this rule of thumb: Unless I'd give a naysayer's argument a >90% chance of coming to fruition, I probably just need to ignore it and address it when it actually shows up in the business (as feedback from, say, real customers). An armchair critic with a story about why I'm going to crash and burn with, say, 60% probability just isn't worth worrying about, because hard work and elbow grease can chip away at that 60% pretty quickly when the time comes.
Hi Paul. I'd love to see your service take off. I've spent a few years in healthcare IT and think that the world would be a better place if you succeed.
With that said, there are a number of startups that have struggled with similar ideas. How are you different from, say, PicnicHealth?
Thanks for the kind words, tkiley! There are a number of great products out there to help people manage their medical data. But that's a big problem to tackle, and we're focused on one small piece of it—requesting medical records. In fact, our market often differs from folks who use a personal health record. Many of our users have been asked by their doctor, their insurance company, or a lawyer to gather and share their medical records and they just want help with that process.
Tesla is shipping 75kWh batteries as 60kWh batteries, and requiring customers to pay an extra $8,500 to flip a configuration bit to unlock that last 15kwh.
I don't mind DRM for digital goods in which the variable cost is essentially $0, but this sort of DRM on physical goods leaves a yucky taste in my mouth. I'm curious how illegal it would be for someone to perform (and sell) a jailbreak/unlock for that last 15kWh of capacity.
I'm surprised at how primitive the response to pg's essay has been. None of it seems to respond to the central point of the essay (which is that economic inequality has many causes, and we should specifically attack the bad causes, not inequality itself).
In spite of all the noise, I do disagree with the central point.
Economic inequality may be caused by good things, but it is still bad. Wealth is opportunity and political influence. Therefore economic inequality is inequality of opportunity and political influence. Persistent intergenerational economic inequality is pretty much bad by definition.
Inequality - a bad thing - can be caused as a byproduct of good activity. It's still bad. It's a negative externality, like environmental pollution. In fact, there's some striking parallels - a buildup of inequality, like a buildup of pollution, can trigger the collapse of the ecosystem.
We need to agree that inequality is categorically bad so we can have a real discussion of how to keep it under control. It would be crazy to argue that farming is good so farm-related pollution does not need to be controlled. Likewise with startups and inequality.
> Economic inequality may be caused by good things, but it is still bad. Wealth is opportunity and political influence.
Paul directly addressed this in his reply to Klein (http://paulgraham.com/klein.html); Ctrl-F "the conversion of money into political power"; in brief, he says that if you're upset that economic inequalities leads to unequal political influence, attack that. Fight to remove the political influence that wealth currently has.
If we lived in a world where everyone has the same opportunities for social mobility (i.e., universal free education from daycare to PhD, unbiased hiring processes) and the same political influence (no SuperPACs, no lobbyists, mandate that no citizen spends more than $100 / year on political donations, and perhaps give every citizen that $100 / year, as a use-it-or-lose-it source of funding for whatever political causes they wanted to support)... if we lived in such a world, would you still be upset that Mark Zuckerberg had a lot more money than you? Why?
>... if we lived in such a world, would you still be upset that Mark Zuckerberg had a lot more money than you? Why?
That's a really good question. Theoretically, I would be fine with that kind of world, but I dont think that kind of world has ever existed or will ever exist. It is more realistic to attack the problem on both fronts - maximize social mobility and minimize the influence of wealth on politics, but also recognize that you will never completely succeed. Wealth will always equal opportunity and influence to some extent, so inequality will always be a bad thing to some extent.
For what it's worth, I'm not upset that Zuck has a lot more money than me. I just think that entrepreneurially generated inequality should not be a sacred cow, and I'm speaking as someone who has created a good deal of inequality with entrepreneurship.
I think you could make a strong case that would still be problamatic. Let me explain this by attempting to uncover what I think is the underlying problem.
Firstly economic inequality may or may not be a problem, so it is probably not worth talking about. It is only when the inequality manifests itself in terms of power between people. Were some people have to work for a wage in bad working conditions (even here in the US) because they have no other options. They may have kids. All the way up to: having to work for Google or Facebook et al. and hating it because you know on your free time you would rather explore your own creative ideas. But people who work at menial labor jobs are just as creative and should be given paths to allow them to pursue their creative interests too.
Language makes us creative beings, and if power constrains that in any way and it can not make itself legitimate (which the burden is on it to do so) than it is wrong for it to be there.
Thus because economic inequality illegimitately constrains the human capacity to express itself creatively it is therefore problamatic and should be dismantled.
PS I realize in theory this sounds all good, but I am more convinced that humans can organize themselves into these freer societies. And those future denizens will think of us as savage as we think of american colonialism and slavery and genocide (native americans) a few hundred years back.
> Paul directly addressed this in his reply to Klein (http://paulgraham.com/klein.html); Ctrl-F "the conversion of money into political power"; in brief, he says that if you're upset that economic inequalities leads to unequal political influence, attack that. Fight to remove the political influence that wealth currently has.
It simply isn't possible at this point. The Supreme Court has seen to that quite thoroughly.
A constitutional amendment to "fix" the problem is beyond the realm of possibility.
The reason we find ourselves so helpless in this fight is because our society's money has shackled us. Think about it: the rich only have power because people submit to their power. People accept their money to do harmful things because they can use that money to get whatever they want from almost anyone. This is the flaw in our money that makes our political system degrade from democracy to capitalism. Votes can be bought, so counting votes is a charade that disguises the fact that the tally of money on each side of an issue matters most.
To fix this, we must fix our money. When someone spends money they got from wealthy people for manipulating our politics, the person who accepts it is fulfilling the promise the money held in the first place. We must refuse to empower money used in this way. As individuals, we must reject money in our own lives when it came from political manipulation so we can remove the incentive to participate in political manipulation.
This is merit capitalism. The technology to make it work exists today, and it doesn't require the impossible task of winning votes in a Congress we can't afford to buy back from the rich. It requires tools to make it easy to reject dirty money and spreading the knowledge that rejecting dirty money is even possible. These are things that we can do. These are things that you can do.
This whole thing is about taxes and yet neither side is honest enough to acknowledge that fact. No one will begrudge PG, Zuckerberg or any of the other high earners continuing to amass considerable wealth so long as they're paying significantly more taxes than they are now.
When that happens, even though there are very rich people, there's also a healthy middle class and the social support systems (safety nets, education, etc) for poor people to reach the middle class. But what we have now is rich people hiding behind capital gains tax rates to actually pay less than people who earn significantly less that they do. And PG, as someone who earns his living primarily through investing, is no doubt taking advantage of this situation.
When PG says "don't address income inequality directly," it's the equivalent of saying "don't raise my taxes" since raising taxes on the wealthy is the method for addressing income inequality directly. IMHO, the reason he's gotten so much flack is that there is a very large proportion of the population that believes that we need to close the loopholes that the uber-wealthy use to avoid paying the right amount of taxes and increase the top marginal tax brackets to above 50%. And yet he wants to talk about addressing income inequality directly as if his critics want to keep people from earning that much in the first place.
I can't tell if he's being deliberately disingenuous or if he actually believes that's what people are suggesting, but the net result is a back and forth conversation at two different contextual levels.
Wait, did you read the essay? He talks about closing tax loopholes and even calls that 'stealing' (search for it in the essay). He also argues:
> For example, let's attack poverty, and if necessary damage wealth in the process. That's much more likely to work than attacking wealth in the hope that you will thereby fix poverty.
I believe, though I may well be wrong, that PG isn't against taxing the rich in order to provide social services and increased education, healthcare, what-have-you.
I think you're right, but this is indeed a large misinterpretation hazard. When he writes about this in the future, he should probably explicitly say, "Tax the 1% far more heavily to pay for the social mobility and equal-access-to-politics programs; that's the only realistic way to fund them."
Perhaps you can enlighten me then...if he's arguing that we close loopholes (and the lower capital gains rate is a loophole) and increase taxes on the wealthy to an over 50% marginal rate, what direct attacks on income inequality is he arguing against? How are people attacking income inequality in any concrete way that isn't about taxation?
Because if there isn't some concrete attack on income inequality, then we're arguing about an abstract concept, which is just pointless.
You could tax big incomes in excess of 50%. Give them low inflation, no inheritance tax and pour all that extra money to defense. Congrats, you have fixed the position of a rich caste.
If one farmer works harder than the guy next door and becomes richer as a result, how is that bad?
It isn't. But if one farmer works harder than another, wealthier farmer, and the wealthier farmer makes 1000 times more than the harder working farmer, that is bad. And that is how the system currently works: we systematically reward people for being wealthy, regardless of any personal qualities or talents. And whereas there is a natural upper bound on how hard you can work, or how clever you can be (we're all human beings, after all), there is no upper bound on how wealthy you can be, and therefore no upper bound on the advantage you can be born with. It's tough to work 1000 times harder than someone else, but trivial to earn 1000 times more from investments if you have 1000 times more to begin with.
-) Sergey Brin is worth $35,000,000,000. Has he worked 35,000 times harder or smarter than the 40-year-old Doctor who earns well and has scrimped and saved to $1m in net worth?
-) Let's say you'd told Sergey - just as he was starting Google - in 20 years' time you'll have $10m in the bank from this. Do you think that would have encouraged or discouraged him?
Brin has arguably created significantly more value than the 40-year-old Doctor. A doctor who likely uses Google to research medical information on a daily basis (as well as uses it for looking up personal information), possibly using a Google device, who gets from place to place using Google Maps, and searches for information for his next published paper on Google Scholar. (and so on, even putting aside the recent expansion of Google into Medical technology).
There's a huge difference between 'significantly more value' and literally thousands of times more value. Had Brin been content to continue in academia after publishing his original research, and left the implementation and the riches to someone else, would we say that he had contributed virtually nothing? It's a myth that our economic system rewards people in direct proportion to the value they create.
I see your point, but it wouldn't have been possibly for him to build Google had it not been for people with MUCH more than $10M in their bank account to bankroll his growth.
As someone who's tried funding a company that way, I can tell you it doesn't work.
Companies like Google, Facebook, Dropbox and Airbnb all looked like crazy ideas to begin with. Ordinary people with limited funds shouldn't be investing in companies like these, as they fail far more often than not.
It's only due to the existence of high-net-worth individuals, who can afford to lose money on most of their investments and who have a "pay it forward" mentality, that these companies can get their start.
If the returns for people Page and Gates and Zuckerburg were capped at $10M, there's a good chance they wouldn't bother.
For people like this, the goal is not personal enrichment but rather the ability to better the world, not just via their products, but also through philanthropy.
Take away the blue sky returns, and you take the motive that is most beneficial to the rest of the world.
> Take away the blue sky returns, and you take the motive that is most beneficial to the rest of the world.
I feel this to be the primary reason we have the technology and infrastructure we do today. Take the Robber Barons, for example, their pursuit of endless returns gave us the railroads, electricity for the masses, and cars. I guess the point is there is good with bad in everything. Sometimes the good outweighs the bad. That's how I am interpreting PG's original wealth inequality essay.
Wealth is both created and distributed. No one in modern life creates value in a vacuum, it is always in concert with many other people, past and present. And aside from governments, no one makes their own money---they get it from other people, in proportion to the value that those people perceive they're getting in return. And this value exchange all rests on top of a system of laws and culture, none of which is in the direct control of the individual. On a day-to-day basis in modern society, wealth distribution is a much bigger force in an average person's life than is wealth creation.
It's dubious only if the potential return is much less than the alternatives. Assuming that the same inequality-reducing mechanism is operating across all the potential investments, their behavior would be unchanged. Investors are looking for the best available return on their investment, not some arbitrary fixed value.
"I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense." - Henry Ford
I assume you also 'know' that the founders of Etsy are 75% less smart now that the market valuation of Etsy is 25% of its high.
Market valuation measures nothing but what someone will pay for something today. It doesn't measure how smart or hard you worked.
Larry Page, net worth $29 billion, and Sergey Brin, net worth $34 billion, have so little political influence that they can't get a small city's government to approve a new bridge over a creek:
Ironically I think smaller local issues are often harder for the wealthy to influence than bigger national issues. As a concerned resident I can probably actually talk face to face with my city representative, and share my concerns about a project like this. I have pretty much no chance of meeting face to face with my state representative without cash or some other means of influence. The councilor probably also has significantly less need for campaign donations from rich benefactors than a national representative. And finally, local representative are most likely making decisions that affect them pretty directly as a resident, whereas national representatives may often be making decisions that have widely dispersed or no direct personal impact.
These are all reasons regularly brought forth by Libertarians and Republicans who prefer that centralized government entities defer to local entities as much as possible.
The same things that make centralized government problematic - making decisions with widely dispersed impact with few personal consequences - are similar for very large organizations.
In so far as large companies are permitted to exist by the people for the benefit of stakeholders rather than shareholders (i.e. employees and their communities, suppliers, customers, as well as actual shareholders and bondholders), the executive leadership of a corporation is much like a government, and in a large company, it's a distant one, subject to autocratic rule and upward redistribution of the value created by the whole.
While the political influence of wealth is obviously bad, I think it is a small factor in comparison with economic influence.
The amount of industry attempting to satiate your desires is proportional to the amount of money you have. Hence the huge disparity between the number of BMW ads on primetime TV and the number of people watching primetime TV that could ever conceivably afford a BMW. The GDP of many countries could be repurposed entirely to serving the desires of the wealthiest few and still not exhaust their purchasing power. In theory, Bill Gates could purchase the entire output of any country smaller than Oman for a year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
This is a factor that globalization proponents don't deal with successfully I think. When a country is isolated, it is only the disparities of wealth within the country that distort the production of the country. Once a country enters global trade it is exposed to many orders of magnitude more of difference in purchasing power.
All of the optimality results in economics assume that the current distribution of wealth is optimal (or at least exogenous), hence pareto optima and not any other type. This factor deserves more thought and discussion.
If you think there are things people should not be able to buy (political sway) then would it not make sense to focus on those who are both selling this service they shouldn't be and also the ones that are actually buying it? There are plenty of things the average person could afford if we let them, the answer to that wasn't "no one gets any money".
"Persistent intergenerational economic inequality is pretty much bad by definition."
If you qualify it that way, sure. That doesn't mean all economic inequality is bad. You don't have to begrudge Sergey Brin his billions, or say the process in which he made those billions in any way is a bad thing, in order to say that people shouldn't be able to inherit billions.
> Economic inequality may be caused by good things, but it is still bad
Let's correct this into: "excessive economic inequality may be caused by good things, but it is still bad". Then I wholeheartedly agree, and probably PG would agree too. Or, at least, I hope he would agree, and not consider only poverty a bad thing.
I think you need to step back even farther: what is the point of money? If you don't have a good answer to that question, how can you reason about the benefits and drawbacks of different ways to distribute that money?
I'm going to out on a limb and suggest that the point of money is economic growth. This may seem like a circular argument, so let me expand on that a little. Imagine you have a farmer. This farmer wants to grow food and he has plenty of land. However, he does not have enough seed to plant all of his land. He has nothing to barter with until after his food is grown, so he ends up "wasting" part of his land (letting it go unplanted) because he could not get enough seed.
In this scenario, everybody is a loser. The farmer grows less plants and will not be able to barter for things he needs in the future. Society also gets less plants. So it makes sense to give the farmer more seeds so that he can plant his whole field. In fact, because he can do that, he can repay the favour in the future by giving up some of his fully grown plants.
Money is a kind of token that can be used to trade for things. It is very useful for society to give people money if they will use it to trade for things that they need, which will in turn produce things that will improve the quality of living for everyone.
Money that is piled up and not spent is not helpful to the economy or society. If there were a limited amount of money (and in some ways there is), then we could say that people who hoard money are a burden on society because they stop people from making use of that money to improve society. Ideally we would split up all the money in the world and give whatever amount is needed to the people who would be able to use it. In a really ideal world, each person would be motivated and able enough to spend the money in a way that would produce benefit for society.
Of course this is not the case. There are many people who hoard money (bad). We can also see that there are people who would spend money improving the beer brewing industry (maybe not so bad) at the expense of investing in life saving medical research (arguably seems better than beer in some ways). In fact, quite a lot of people simply want to consume goods and distribute money around, as opposed to trying to improve things. Those people are at best neutral to the system, though better than the hoarders.
From a societal point of view, it is best to distribute money in a way that maximises people's ability to use it beneficially, while minimizing people's ability to hoard it or distribute it arbitrarily (buying shiny useless toys or food/shelter that they don't need). So already we can see that depending on what people want to do with money, it is beneficial for society that there is an inequality.
Having said all that, I think that the inequality that we have reached at the moment is far from ideal. Now the really interesting bit is that what I wrote so far seems to favour a fascist economic system. I suspect we can do better, though ;-)
pg argues we shouldn't attack inequality itself because inequality has both good and bad causes and is thus amoral. He argues we should focus on the bad causes instead.
I disagree. Inequality may have good and bad causes, but it is not amoral. Persistent transgenerational inequality is, by definition, the breakdown of democracy, meritocracy, and universal opportunity, and it is bad, even if it is caused by good things.
Inequality is a bad side effect of (usually) good processes. We already have an economic term for this: It's a negative externality - like environmental pollution.
The similarities between inequality and pollution give me considerable pause for thought. Both can grow or dissipate over time in the right conditions. Both are growing much too quickly right now, threatening to cause severe damage to our biological and economic ecosystems.
It is important that we recognize inequality as categorically bad, even when it is caused by good things like entrepreneurship. This allows us to have real discussions about how we keep inequality - like pollution - under control.
Ironically, this will preserve the democratic and meritocratic tendencies that have made the past 50 years such a great time for startups.
That's a very insightful analogy. But the concept of "externalities" only applies because the game of acquisition is loaded in ways that - literally - doesn't account for social and environmental damage.
There would be much less inequality, and much less pollution, if the effects of both were costed accurately.
Free-marketers always argue that there would be much less innovation too. I think that's nonsense. You maximise growth by lowering the cost of entry to new markets as far as it will go, and making business-building as attractive as you can make it to anyone who has a service or product to offer.
Traditionally this is rationed by very limited access to capital. In an innovation economy, with more equality, much wider access to capital would not only increase economic participation for most of the population, it would also make entrepreneurial activity a lot more possible.
This is the opposite of the current model, where you can only access capital by being born into the oligarchy, or being persuasive enough to talk your way into it past the gatekeepers, or - much too rarely - having the talent and energy to bootstrap a successful business from a cold start.
Inequality is a form of rationing. It's inexcusably stupid and self-destructive in any culture that considers itself economically civilised.
I think it's great, for the exact reason that other people think it's slow and boring. It's specifically designed to quash your tendency to speedrun or minmax: It requires you to simply come along for the ride.
On the one hand, this is a bit annoying sometimes. On the other hand, it revives the sense of wonder that I haven't felt since I learned to treat games as something to win rather than something to get lost in.