A while ago, I stumbled across the following study of the political opinions of tech entrepreneurs, which found a distinctive pattern. Tech entrepreneurs tend to have liberal positions on social issues, globalism, and redistribution, while having conservative opinions on regulation.
Specifically, according to the questionnaire, tech entrepreneurs believe the following:
Globalism
- We should not pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate on problems at home.
- We should not, in trade agreements, prioritize American jobs over improving the standard of living of people overseas.*
- Free trade agreements are a good thing.
- We should let more people immigrate to America.
Redistribution
- We should have universal health care, even if it means raising taxes.
- We should have programs which benefit only the poorest Americans.
- We should support taxes on those making more than $250,000 a year.
- We should support taxes on those making more than $1 million a year.
- We should increase federal spending on the poor.
Regulation
- We should not regulate Uber like taxis.
- We should not regulate gig workers like regular workers.
- It is too hard to fire workers.
- Government regulation of business does more harm than good.**
- Regulations on self-driving cars should stay the same.
- Regulations on drones should increase.***
- Regulations on how Internet companies store data should increase or stay the same.****
Social Issues
- Same-sex marriage should be legal.
- Abortion should be a matter of personal choice.
- The death penalty should not be legal.
- Gun control is a good idea.
*Actually, tech entrepreneurs still favor American jobs (boo! hiss!) but much less so than everyone else, so I’m counting it.
**Tech entrepreneurs are between “somewhat disagree” and “somewhat agree” on this one, which means they’re less pro-regulation than the average college-educated Democrat and Democratic donor, but more pro-regulation than any Republican and, weirdly, the average Democrat.
***Tech entrepreneurs are less pro-drone-regulation than college-educated Democrats and Democratic donors, about tied with Republican donors, and more pro-regulation than the average Democrat or Republican. No, I have no idea why average Democrats are so ambivalent about regulation.
****This is more anti-regulation than anybody except Republican donors.
As I read through this questionnaire, I was like “oh crap, I agree with tech entrepreneurs about everything”. So I thought I would sketch the outlines of the Silicon Valley liberal perspective from my own point of view.
If you have to sum up Silicon Valley liberalism in one quip, it’s “the government shouldn’t do anything except redistribution.”
That’s a little facile. The Silicon Valley liberal does see a role for regulation. A carbon tax can help prevent global warming. Congestion pricing could prevent traffic jams. It makes sense to regulate drugs so that people know they’re getting what it says they’re getting on the bottle.
But from the perspective of the Silicon Valley liberal, the burden of proof is on the people saying the regulation is a good idea. The Silicon Valley liberal takes seriously the idea of regulatory capture: they worry that special interests have an incentive to pervert even the most high-minded regulation into regulations that advance their own interests at the expense of everybody else. They worry about regulations making it easier to engage in rent-seeking, collecting money from people without actually benefiting anyone. They believe the invisible hand of the market usually improves outcomes for everyone, and before they accept a regulation they want to be sure that in this case the market has failed.
Most of all, the Silicon Valley liberal fears regulation because of their concern that regulation will hurt poor people. Zoning regulation and rent control are well-intentioned, but they mean that poor people in the Bay Area can’t afford a job within driving distance of their house. Minimum-wage laws might cause people to lose their jobs. Hairdresser licenses prevent poor women from getting good jobs braiding hair. A dyslexic I once knew who was an excellent carpenter illegally remodeled people’s homes for money because he could not read well enough to get the appropriate licenses.
When the Silicon Valley liberal supports regulations, they tend to support regulations that are minimal and freedom-maximizing. For example, Silicon Valley liberals tend to favor a universal basic income or negative income tax over more complicated welfare programs, because it gives people the maximum freedom to make their own decisions with what they should do with their money. Similarly, Silicon Valley liberals tend to prefer taxing harmful things to banning them, all things considered, because that allows people to decide to spew carbon or drive in crowded cities as long as it’s worth it to them.
You might notice that the ‘regulation’ section of the questionnaire is the one festooned with the most asterisks. I think that is because Silicon Valley liberals cannot fairly be described as anti-regulation. Rather, they are suspicious of regulation, but very very enthusiastic about regulation that passes the sniff test.
(One flaw with the questionnaire, unfortunately, is that since most of the questions are about tech it is unclear whether Silicon Valley liberals are suspicious about regulation in general or regulation of tech specifically. However, I live here, and the former is clearly the case.)
Silicon Valley liberals have a strong technocratic bias. They are unusually likely to identify themselves and their preferred policies as “economically literate.” If something could reasonably be described as “data-driven” or “evidence-based,” Silicon Valley liberals are inclined to like it. Silicon Valley liberals tend to support wonky policies: you can see several mentioned so far in this post, including YIMBYism, congestion pricing, carbon taxes, universal basic income/negative income tax, and opposition to licensing. (Here we can see the common DNA between Silicon Valley liberalism and effective altruism.)
I believe the technocratic impulse is behind the otherwise puzzling tendency for Silicon Valley liberals to support single-payer health care, which seems to go against all their heuristics about regulation. I have had many conversations with Silicon Valley liberals where they’re like “yeah, it’s weird that single-payer health care works, but it obviously does, so let’s do it.”
Silicon Valley liberals also tend to be globalist. It’s important not to overexaggerate here: while Silicon Valley liberals typically support free trade and freer immigration, they still believe trade agreements should favor American jobs over the welfare of people overseas. There is a natural tendency to prioritize people in one’s own country, which Silicon Valley liberals still have. One important detail, I think, is that Silicon Valley liberals tend to believe free trade and freer immigration benefits everyone, including poorer people in one’s own country; they point to the economic theory and empirical research that appears to show this is the case.
One thing I’m uncertain of is how best to describe the Silicon Valley liberal attitude towards social issues. Part of the problem is that, while there are certainly many programmers with very Tumblr attitudes on social issues, many of them are, for example, Communists. Unfortunately, people rarely identify their economic views before saying how extremely Tumblr they are, so it is difficult to estimate how many Silicon Valley liberals are extremely Tumblr. I am also trying to account for the fact that many of my friends are rationalists, who tend to be anti-social-justice because of a founder effect from Slate Star Codex.
Certainly, the Silicon Valley liberal has a libertarian bias in their thoughts on social issues. All things equal, the Silicon Valley liberal is likely to care more about drug policy, criminal justice reform, and civil liberties than an establishment Democrat does. “We should just leave the freaking cake guy alone and let him bake his homophobe cakes” is not necessarily a mainstream opinion among Silicon Valley liberals, but it definitely is more common than among liberals elsewhere.
There is certainly an anti-feminist tendency among many Silicon Valley liberals, as we see in famous cases such as James Damore. But there is also certainly a feminist tendency, as we see in famous cases such as all the programmers at Google calling for the firing of James Damore.
I hope that the “Silicon Valley liberal” terminology becomes more commonly used, because I think it makes discussion of Silicon Valley’s politics clearer. There are several other terms used to describe Silicon Valley liberals, but to my mind they are generally inadequate. Some Silicon Valley liberals identify as “neoliberal,” but the term is used for so many contradictory sets of beliefs that it appears to be utterly meaningless; certainly, Silicon Valley liberals are unlikely to follow the Austrian School and are often quite Keynesian.
Silicon Valley liberals also sometimes identify as “centrist” and “moderate.” While it’s true that Silicon Valley liberals are centrist and moderate in that they tend to agree more with Republicans on some issues and more with Democrats on other issues, they are not centrist and moderate in that their views on many issues are fairly extreme or outside the Overton Window. The research on tech entrepreneurs found that they were substantially more globalist than the average Democrat, and many Silicon Valley liberals support ideas that are ludicrously outside the mainstream (drug decriminalization) or don’t come up in conventional political discourse at all (UBI).
“Libertarian” is commonly used to describe Silicon Valley liberals, both by their supporters and their detractors (the former in such constructions as “left-libertarian” and “liberaltarian”, the latter in such constructions as “libertarian techbro”). While Silicon Valley liberalism has a definite libertarian tendency, I don’t actually think Silicon Valley liberals are fairly described as libertarians. Favorite Silicon Valley liberal policies such as a UBI would require in a massive expansion of the state’s power to tax. Many Silicon Valley liberals support regulations, such as a congestion tax or alcohol taxes, that orthodox libertarians would frown upon.
Over the next few years, I expect Silicon Valley liberalism to grow in prominence on the national stage, as the Democratic party adjusts to the increasing share of its big donors who are tech entrepreneurs. Perhaps we can even have senators and representatives from California who cater to Silicon Valley liberal interests. If this happens, it’ll be important that people understand what Silicon Valley liberalism actually is, and I hope this blog post helps spark a discussion.
Thing of Things 
I think that the former is the case among rationalists and people similar to them, but the latter is pretty common too, though I don’t really have anything to back that up other than my vague impressions from before I met the rationalists. (Though it’s also possible that the politics have drifted since that time.)
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Apparently I’m a silicon valley liberal despite never having been without a few thousand miles of silicon valley.
I know that I find many regulations written for areas I’m intimately familiar with are often terrible because they get written by ignorant idealists. Arts students and lawyers with no understanding of what they’re trying to regulate at best and populists who are just screaming for the camera at worst.
The slightly less terrible regulations are often written by cynical people working for big companies that then hand the documents to their pet politicians to sign and those ones tend to be written to favor the sponsor. And that has it’s own problems…
I remember a mention on SSC
“Gell-Mann Amnesia, where physicists notice that everything the mainstream says about physics is laughably wrong but think the rest is okay, doctors notice that everything the mainstream says about medicine is laughably wrong but think the rest is okay, et cetera.”
Whenever I learn about a new area of expertise I keep finding that the regulations that the Arts students and Law students of the world keep trying to place on it are terrible and counterproductive and stupid.
This does not make me optimistic about the general case….
One of the few times that I’ve talked to someone in a specialty who took the position that most regulation in their area of expertise was actually pretty sane, minimalist and reasonable was an expert on the laws around drug trials…. perversely everyone outside of drug trials seems convinced they’re terrible.
I suspect there’s an element of bike-shedding at fault.
The regulations that seem to work are either for really simple things that everyone can genuinely understand like “no using the side of my house for target practice” or areas so complex that people know that they can’t meaningfully contribute or talk about them.
In the no mans land in the middle: here be incompetent dragons.
Everyone has opinions on banks and landlords and computers and the internet but almost no understanding of anything under the hood. -> bad outcome.
But when it comes to nuclear power plants cooling systems or advanced statistical modeling you don’t get idiot grandstanding politicians going on stage and declaring that they’re sure they know best and that there’s nothing wrong with insisting that the safety valves inside nuclear reactors use good-american-copper rather than evil-chinese-steel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
http://bikeshed.com/
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This isn’t as bad as I thought. I strongly disagree with their rejection of protections (framed as “regulations”), most especially protections for worker’s rights, vulnerable groups, and (most urgently) the environment; and I’m wary that, if they really grow in political power, they might pressure to undo many hard-won protections. But the other three topics are basically decent positions.
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That is a good note on wording (and framing), I need to remember that!
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Yeah, when someone answers in the affirmative about “it is too hard to fire workers”, I take with a grain of salt their starry-eyed advocacy for “globalisation lifts workers out of poverty” – nah mate, what you mean is “overseas workers are dirt-cheap relative to workers here, we can cut costs by having a factory in Poorovia, share price goes up, bonuses and trebles all round for managment!”
The poverty-lifting is a secondary effect which is beneficial but is not the primary reason for “let’s headquarter our American multinational in Lichtenstein, have our production capacity in Backwaterstan, and funnel our profits through Jersey in a reverse-quadruple-payback scheme”.
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I think there is an element of people assuming that the “protections” come with no downside.
My fathers generation had less “protections”… but there’s an old story from when my parents met, they used to work with 1 week notice and paid 1 week in arrears. (basically to avoid people walking off without notice)
My mother was due to visit for a weekend and my dad wanted a little extra cash in hand to take her out… so he gave his notice and quit his job to get an extra weeks cash in hand.
They had a nice weekend and then on monday he took a walk and got another job.
They weren’t *great* jobs. But they were paying jobs.
For comparison when I was the same age I applied for a job in a shop. The company did 3 rounds of interviews which took over a month. I didn’t get the job because I was away for a weekend when they called and asked me to come in for another surprise round of interviews at short notice. Every job I’ve ever gotten has involved many weeks to acquire.
The ease of just walking in, picking up a “help wanted” sign and being told “sure, we’ll see how it goes” is something unimaginable to my generation.
Thanks to the “protections”
Part of the reason seems to be that when it’s extremely hard to get rid of people who turn out to be awful… companies become conservative.
it’s almost impossible to fire someone after you’ve hired them if it turns out they’re simply incapable of doing the job, especially related to disability.
But you can have interview tests as long as they’re justifiable as reasonably assessing things required for the job.
When you can’t legally fire a copywriter you just hired who turns out to be so severely dyslexic that they’re entirely incapable of doing the job you hired them to do because that would be firing someone for being disabled… you’re going to have rounds of stupidly trivial tests to make sure candidates are genuinely literate.
My SO gets pissed off every time she gets a new nursing job and has to go through the ceremony of trivial math and english tests because if they accidentally hire someone who can’t safely do drug calculations or read charts because of dyscalculia or extreme dyslexia they’re fucked.
If you literally can’t legally fire a pilot you hired to fly a plane if it turns out they’re legally blind and somehow got through the interview process while hiding it… you’re gonna have a round of tests to check that.(an actual thing in UK employment law, a case went to court where a pilot didn’t have good enough vision to keep their job but wasn’t legally blind and it was noted that if they were legally blind then the employer would be forced to keep them on)
Friends with various minor but visible health problems find getting jobs extremely difficult because, frankly, if the employer gets unlucky they could spend the next year after their probationary period turning up 1 day a week then drag the company through the courts for years, all while drawing a full salary.
People respond to that kind of risk rationally.
And that price is borne by every unemployed person who finds they have to spend weeks going through rounds of seemingly stupid trivial tests for stupid trivial jobs.
It’s not free.
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I would argue that the common thread is that Silicon Valley (SV) tends to be more extremist in the sense that they tend to pick only a few goals and then support everything that achieves those goals, often ignoring that any goal will have downsides, so maximizing very few goal is often a bad idea.
For example, let’s say that you have goal A and B where each goal has about equal utility (but often to different people). You can get 80% of goal A and 80% of goal B if you accept a balance between these goals, rather than maximizing one. So in total, you get 80+80=160. If you only maximize for goal A, you instead get 95% of goal A, but only 40% of goal B. So then in total, you get 95+40=135. So you can very easily lose overall utility by not balancing goals.
Believing that the above scenario is common merely requires a belief in low-hanging fruit (or more formally, a decreasing utility per cost function).
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Both the very radical feminism and ‘anti-feminism’ in SV may actually be because they tend to take the professed goals of feminism at face value and then reason from principles, rather than be bound by taboos. For example, Damore wanted accommodations specifically to increase/equalize the number of women at Google. He objected to discrimination against individual men, but not discrimination against men collectively (by seeking to make jobs at Google less suitable for men and more for women). So from my perspective, Damore is actually extremely feminist if you judge him merely by what feminists typically say their goals are.
Damore violated the taboo on believing in certain facts. Of course, for certain personalities, facts are not values. Their ‘this is right’ is mainly about how things ‘are.’ However, for other personalities, facts are values and their ‘this is right’ is very much also how things ‘should be.’
So when you have both types of personalities in SV, combined with extremism, you can end up with two different groups that claim to have different values, but in reality mainly seem to disagree on the facts. Their strong opposition to each other seems to be more narcissism of small differences than that they fundamentally disagree in their goals.
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Yep. Compare this:
To this:
Ozy, I’m confused about how your post on the gender wage gap is an accurate description of the viewpoints of “smart, well-informed feminists” but the Google memo (which if anything is more feminist than your post given 4/5 of its anti-gender-gap policy proposals focus on liberating women compared to “merely” 4/8 of your anti-gender-gap policy proposals) is a “famous case” of “an anti-feminist tendency among many Silicon Valley liberals”. You’re pretty smart, so I guess there is something I’m missing here and the two can’t be compared. Could you please explain what this something is ?
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I think a lot of the reason is just framing. Asking low-information voters how much they support “government regulation” without giving much detail about what is being regulated, how, and why, makes the downside of regulation (enforcement) more salient than any potential upside. On the other hand, you could probably find all sorts of concrete proposals for new regulations that would poll well, if presented in a way that highlighted their allegedly noble purpose and was vague about enforcement mechanisms. I remember hearing something on the radio last winter about how speculators were buying out stocks of whatever they thought was likely to be the trendiest Christmas gift in a given year, sometimes earning huge profits reselling them at a markup. So naturally legislators were working on an “anti-Scrooge” (or was it “anti-Grinch”?) bill to somehow put a stop to this dastardly activity.
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I notice a lack here of mention of disability rights, an area where both rationalists and EA have poor records, and where government requirements make important and testified to differences that are often under threat. (As I recall you’ve mentioned this area in some prior posts, for instance your post on UBI.)
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Unfortunately, I’m not sure how much your average SV liberal thinks about disability at all! I suspect not often– it’s a commonly ignored issue.
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Now that you mention it, yeah, I agree. Utilitarianism would suggest that if it’s less costly to increase the utility of or produced by able-bodied people, disabled people shouldn’t get more than the minimum required attention. This is bad for me and people I care about, but goshdarnit, I cannot come up with a good argument in our favor. The Free Market does not work for minorities with special needs, especially when the need requires loads of engineering and the minority is tiny and majority unemployed and there’s a seemingly infinite supply of engineering jobs that pay way better than, for example, innovations in Braille tech.
I keep coming back to increasing the purchasing power of such disabled people, and I cannot come up with a means of doing so. Disability, by definition, reduces one’s ability to do something, and there are misconceptions and discrimination on top of that, so we’re stuck with this situation where a huge number of disabled people are dependent on charity, welfare, and regulation to get by. It’s like investing in a poor country with specific resource deficiencies and no or very few advantages to make up for it. It’s an unexploited opportunity, but how are you going to get a good enough return on investment to make it a better choice than investing in more reliable countries, like China or Google?
The perspective seems to be to invest in eradicating disability, especially if it can done in a more broadly useful way such as FAI or regenerative medicine. I don’t like this response because it ignores all the disabled people who presently exist, and assumes that whatever they come up with works perfectly for everyone. Like, OK, so if in 2100 you’ve made all physical disabilities treatable… what does that do for me, 81.25 years before 2100? Am I even going to live that long?
So I’m kinda stumped. If I could convince myself that torturing myself to build up enough funds to work toward such things was acceptable, maybe I’d just try to work at Amazon or whatever for 10 years. Where I’m currently at, though, that sounds like effectively just sacrificing everything for a vague hope that maybe something good will happen to someone I don’t know. So I will continue to contemplate possible economic strategies that will never amount to anything.
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Physically disabled people who are reasonably smart probably have more opportunities than ever to earn a decent living, given how computers can solve/reduce many disability issues. I helped develop a call center system that allows people to work from anywhere, which was specifically intended for workers with disabilities or other limitations (like care giving responsibilities) that limit their ability to travel or otherwise work in an office.
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I would argue that there are many technologies that are ‘dual use’ or can be relatively easily adapted for disabled people, so they are great both for able and disabled people. These are the best opportunity to get lots of investment.
An obvious example is autonomously driving cars.
Another example is that there seems to be something hampering people from working at home, despite the huge advantages. The reasons are probably social and communicative limitations. Solutions that change that would have enormous advantages to the able, as it can reduce the time spent on travel/commuting, help reduce traffic jams, pollution, global warming, etc. It also obviously would help many disabled people.
Exoskeletons also are interesting technology that may help disabled people. The military spends money on developing that technology further, because they are current giving soldiers so much to carry that front-line service is fairly effective at creating disabled people. It could also be great for movers, builders, old people, etc.
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It’s not single-payer healthcare that is “unreasonably” cost-effective; pretty much all developed non-American countries have reasonably priced healthcare, regardless of system. Possibly relevant: pretty much all developed non-American countries have significantly lower salaries for doctors than the US.
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I’m not sure if the American doctor sallaries come more from the outlandish cost of getting an MD, or from the historical notion of doctors being minor nobility. There’s an SSC article that compares Irish doctors to American doctors, and specifically the education required of each, and makes a compelling case for education being a major factor. OTOH, maybe American doctor education is so expensive because of the history of doctoring being considered a high-class profession.
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Silicon Valley liberals also sometimes identify as “centrist” and “moderate.” While it’s true that Silicon Valley liberals are centrist and moderate in that they tend to agree more with Republicans on some issues and more with Democrats on other issues, they are not centrist and moderate in that their views on many issues are fairly extreme or outside the Overton Window. The research on tech entrepreneurs found that they were substantially more globalist than the average Democrat, and many Silicon Valley liberals support ideas that are ludicrously outside the mainstream (drug decriminalization) or don’t come up in conventional political discourse at all (UBI).
Note that (particular examples aside) this basically describes anyone who, y’know, actually tries to be coherent! The Republicans and the Democrats do not describe coherent sets of ideas, and neither does attempting to interpolate between them. If you actually try to be coherent you will find yourself going off in some other direction, and taking it seriously will result in something like the above.
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Sure, although very many people create a coherent set of goals and policies to achieve those goals by ignoring certain complexities*. This may then result in a view that is internally consistent, but not externally (in other words, it doesn’t have contradictions, but it is inconsistent with reality).
For example, capitalism very obviously coerces many people to do jobs (or to do jobs in a way) that they would not do without (financial) coercion. This coercion then presumably creates a lot of value for other people and thus general prosperity.
One of the common touted benefits and/or expected consequences of a substantial UBI is that it frees people from capitalist coercion, but if this then substantially reduces prosperity, a substantial UBI becomes even less affordable by society.
* I suspect that any non-trivial set of goals and policies to achieve those goals is internally and/or externally inconsistent.
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>We should not regulate Uber like taxis.
What’s your reasoning here?
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That most taxi regulation is naked rent-seeking and artificial barriers to entry.
For a perfect example: limited numbers of taxi plates.
Even in theory they’re a artificial way to limit supply to increase taxi profits at the expense of consumers.
but the sad thing is that in many places they don’t even help the drivers.
Instead you create a rentier class who rent plates out to drivers.
So the drivers still end up making crap money and the consumers get screwed and the only one who benefits is some old rich person who’s bought up a load of plates to rent out while not lifting a finger themselves nor contributing jack-all.
taxi regulation in many places is unbelievably awful.
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Taxi regulation in most places is there to ensure that the industry is itself sustainable. The profits of the taxi industry are actually very marginal which is why there aren’t any large multinational taxi companies. On the other hand Uber loses up to 4.5 billion dollars per year and Uber fans have never provided a shred of evidence for the longterm viability of the rideshare industry.
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So? Uber goes bust and some rich people who sank money into shares end up effectively transferring a chunk of their wealth to lots of poor taxi drivers over the course of a few years.
Uber, Lyft, SPLT,Hailo,Sidecar.
if uber fails it fails, the drivers sign up with a competitor and one with a viable business and pricing model will win.
In most cities taxi companies are terrible, you can’t trust them to turn up when they say they will or to charge what they say they’ll charge and unless you can remember the reg of the taxi if a driver assaults you you’ve basically got nothing to show you who they even were.
Meanwhile the rideshare apps record all that along with location data.
They’re losing to the various newcomers because they’re pretty much universally terrible.
And as a result more people are using the new generation of taxis more. The entry of uber and similar rideshare apps into a region correlate with a massive drop-off in drunk driving fatalities.
The taxi industry is entirely capable of being sustainable without needing to ban people from working as taxi drivers unless they can get the blessing of an existing cartel.
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In the case of the rideshare industry the wealth is largely being transferred to consumers who are getting half-price rides everywhere. That you think the money is going to the drivers here shows your basic ignorance of the industry and I suspect you are just making things up because the idea of Uber appeals to your tribal ingroup.
Rideshare apps are recording location data of customers that cannot afford personal drivers and will go back to walking or public transport if the prices are ever raised to the point at which these companies could turn a profit. Completely useless data.
Taxi companies show up when they want to because they actually want to make money. That’s capitalism for you.
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None of these rideshare companies have a viable business model and none of their fans (e.g. you) have ever shown a shred of evidence that they have a viable business model. The only viable business model is going back to the taxi business model.
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Since when is it the government’s job to make sure that companies can earn a profit? If taxi cab companies can’t earn a profit without government intervention then they deserve to go bankrupt.
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@ozymandias I agree with this because I am a communist. However, liberals typically like to provide regulation/state enforcement of certain rules in order to ensure ongoing profits. Police protecting private property is one example. Taxi medallions is another.
I have a suspicion that rideshare companies were always angling for government intervention btw, as it’s the only way they could stick around longterm.
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Silicon Valley liberals believe in state enforcement of certain rules to create the conditions which markets require to work (e.g. police protection of private property, taxing externalities, provision of public goods) but do not believe in state enforcement of certain rules to declare winners and losers in the marketplace.
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@ozymandias Those are two ways of saying the exact same thing. You just said it the positive way the first time and the negative way the second time. The taxi industry requires regulation in order to exist and to ensure longterm profits. Uber has essentially made a bet against these regulations, and is currently losing that bet to the tune of 3-5 billion dollars per year. I’m confused as to what you think is happening here. If Uber is a “winner” why are they losing so much money?
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I disagree that the only purpose of regulation is to ensure profitability. A major if not main reason is/was to make taxi drivers behave better. Without regulation, it is/was extremely common for drivers to take detours, reject less profitable rides, abandon customers that are waiting for them if they spot a more profitable customer on the way, not know (obscure) roads or otherwise to behave poorly. Even with regulation, this is not uncommon.
Requiring and limiting the number of taxi plates reduces the number of taxi drivers who only drive during busy hours. Historically those behaved worse than drivers who drove all day and allowing them would drive down the profitability & thus number of day drivers, resulting in difficulties in hailing a cab during the day. The two groups also got into fights with each other.
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I would argue that there are two innovations that have made regulation far less necessary:
– Navigation systems that make it unnecessary for drivers to learn all roads and routes
– Smartphones that allow controls on driver behavior like customer ratings and make it easier to hail a cab when supply & demand is low
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Taxis had navigation systems well before Uber became popular and will continue to have them afterwards.
Artificially pumping up both supply and demand is also why Uber are losing billions of dollars per year.
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If Uber is a “winner” why are they losing so much money?
Because that is how startups work. Growth is placed ahead of profitability.
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@Fisher That might be how things work in the software industry but the taxi industry famously doesn’t scale very well, as rideshare companies are slowly working out.
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Then what’s wrong with lots of competing micro-ubers?
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@Lambert Uber is only popular because it has artificially cheap rates (i.e. does not charge the passenger the full cost of the ride) and because it pays too many drivers to be on the road at the same time (popular for passengers because they come to you quickly but also means Uber is losing massive money). A “micro” Uber inherently can’t exist because these things only come about with massive financial backing. A micro-uber will inherently look more like a taxi since taxis are more efficient and actually make money.
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That’s also how things work in the “actual production of physical goods” (i.e. manufacturing) industry.
Real-world example: Global Foundries is a microchip manufacturing company founded in the late 2000s. It has hemorrhaged cash in building factories, hiring personnel, developing tech etc and generally in getting big enough for Apple, Qualcomm, etc. to consider them for jobs.
They may be profitable “soon.” But Mubadala’s plan is once profitability occurs, it will be grown and exist for at least thirty years, providing the ROI that was needed.
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I see this example trotted out every time, and I would like some goddamn figures on that, please.
Cursory Googling informs me that so far the answer is “we don’t know”, since hair braiding is a new addition to beautician/cosmetology categories:
So since they lump hair braiders in with hairdressers generally, we are not getting a like with like comparison. Hairdressers will generally have training in a wide range of techniques and be licensed, so the available figures are for “qualified person working in a salon’ and not ‘amateur doing it out of her front room’.
I don’t know how much braiding costs. I imagine “unlicensed amateur working from home” is going to charge less than a hair or beauty salon, because that’s the attraction for a customer – Sheila charges less than Marge’s Salon. If you can be sure of a steady rate of twenty customers a week charging them ten dollars a time, then you’ve got two hundred dollars a week on top of any other income you may have.
The problem then is, do you declare that income, because if you don’t, you’re setting yourself up for a hell of a time with the tax gatherers.
I imagine a lot of unlicensed hair braiders really do carry it out on an ‘under the table’ basis, as an addition to working a job/claiming welfare/other source of income. I don’t see that “legalise unlicenced braiders” is going to make a huge dent in working poverty, because if they’re legal, they’re liable for tax, and a lot of women doing this kind of work are not interested in formally setting up a business and paying tax etc.
Oh, and it’s by no means a national case that everywhere does not permit unlicenced hair braiders:
tl, dr: I’m sick to the back teeth of unsourced examples like this with no solid figures being trotted out for anti-regulation arguments. Great, now an unlicenced hair braider can apply for a job in a hairdressing salon alongside someone who has served an apprenticeship. If I’m the potential employer, I’m going to employ the one who has qualifications because I know what’s involved there. I don’t know if Amateur Annie is any good, or if I’m going to have a stream of customers complaining she ruined their hair.
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I think the point is more “why the hell is that even a licensed profession in the first place”
It’s easy enough to see why we’d want to license surgeons or gas workers.
But hair braiders?
[insert scene from cheap scifi action movie: ]
“Oh no, THE BRAIDS! They’re MUTATING!”
“The fools!”
“Didn’t they know the basics of braiding safety! Now there’s a runaway reaction that’s going to wipe out the entire eastern seaboard!”
“Quickly! Alert the emergency braid response unit!”
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Hmm the political views of tech entrepreneurs can’t really be ascribed to Silicon Valley in general though. In particular I would guess (and I believe I have read somewhere though I don’t have it in front of me) that the anti-regulatory attitude is a lot common among “tech entrepreneurs” than among the average Silicon Valley programmer who doesn’t have such a personal stake in keeping the government off their back.
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Yes, this. Think of this as a survey of small business owners, who are generally known for having (relatively) extreme anti-regulatory views. It’s not likely that the average Silicon Valley programmer shares these views.
Also, James Damore is not a Silicon Valley liberal; I’m pretty sure he describes himself as center-right.
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Nostalgebraist said this was his political beliefs and he described it as “small-government socialism”.
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Socialism already is small-government socialism. In fact, socialism is no-government socialism!
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You probably mean the no-true-Scottsman variant of socialism which has never been tried. Because the real instances typically included a lot of government micromanagement, which required a lot of government.
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I have not lived in San Francisco in a long time — since before more of you were born, I’d guess. But it looks like some fundamentals haven’t changed.
In The Olden Days, people who lived there had a reputation for being — and actually were — shall we say, excessively credible. There is a reason it was a hotspot for various cults and novel religions/self-improvement societies. (Anyone else amazed (or did you even know) that supporters of the People’s Temple are still in office?) Now it looks like only the outward trappings have changed. It’s still a situation where people think they are going to change the world for the better, only now they are writing code instead of chanting.
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It seems likely that some psychedelics, in particular LSD, permanently increase gullibility in people. San Francisco happens to have the only (unofficial) LSD museum, suggesting that the place is and/or was a hotspot for LSD use.
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The study doesn’t say anything about tech entrepreneurs believing in anything you say after the grey line. In fact tech entrepreneurs not believing in regulation is simply not compatible with them supposedly believing in taxing externalities. Are you sure you’re not projecting your own political opinions on tech entrepreneurs ?
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Related: Contrary to what Ozy seems to think, tech entrepreneurs and tech employees don’t believe in the same ideology. (This isn’t surprising to a left-winger like me.)
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What is a “Tumblr attitude”?
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This has been referred to as “left-neoliberalism” by critics.
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Also, considering I’m talking about Matt Bruenig’s criticisms of “left”-neoliberalism, and Ozy claim that supporting congestion pricing makes them a liberal and not a libertarian (even though libertarian supporters of free-market roads like Murray Rothbard or David Friedman support congestion pricing), I would miss an opportunity if I didn’t linked to Matt’s essay “Pricing out poor people is not a solution”, expressing the radical idea that imposing a poll tax to kick out poor people from roads is not in fact a progressive policy.
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A congestion tax prices in an externality, so that is libertarian.
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What I had in mind is more that congestion pricing is just a price for using a road, which is an inherent part of privatizing roads, which is right-libertarian.
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