Well, it’s hard to know what specifically you’re objecting to if you won’t link to them. Citing the arguments you’re criticizing is a pretty basic norm of discourse, unless you want to make an argument that these arguments are so well known that the source doesn’t matter. But I don’t think that is the case here, and even if it were, you still have to lay out your version of those arguments cleanly and clearly.
The part that I’m most skeptical of is your claim about the dynamics of job creation. You offer a vision in which a fixed number of rich people create a fixed number of jobs, which they can take with them if they leave a city. Workers compete for this fixed number of jobs, and this is what motivates them to move into big cities. That’s a rejection of econ 101, and if you’re rejecting econ 101, it makes me feel discouraged that we will have a productive discussion. What has led you to this zero-sum view of the economy?
Citing the arguments you’re criticizing is a pretty basic norm of discourse
While the title says “anti-YIMBY” what I’m trying to do here isn’t counter specific pro-YIMBY arguments, but rather to lay out an opposing position. If there are specific pro-YIMBY arguments that people then feel effectively counter that position, I can respond to those in that context.
That’s a rejection of econ 101, and if you’re rejecting econ 101, it makes me feel discouraged that we will have a productive discussion.
Every notable economist situationally rejects econ 101.
What has led you to this zero-sum view of the economy?
It’s not that I started out with this view due to some natural tendencies, if that’s what you’re wondering. I was initially more of a libertarian and had more faith in the people running the economy. What changed my mind was observation. Getting close enough to big investors and powerful executives to see how dumb they really were. Seeing how much of the work at corporations is fake. Seeing the moral mazes. Seeing how much wealth concentration there really is. Seeing how much of the economy is driven by the whims of the ultra-wealthy, and by providing luxury services to the people who provide luxury services to them. And so on.
I understand that this is your aim. I guess what I am saying is that it does not seem like a good aim to me relative to the aim of countering specific, quotable arguments and generally making an effort to contextualize your arguments in some specific strain of discourse. I.e. cite something and respond to something.
One important reason why is that your argument is not specific or evidence-backed or carefully defined enough to agree or disagree with it, without asking you lots of additional clarifying questions. The effort of anticipating and addressing those clarifying questions is the basic work an author is expected to do. Participating in an ongoing conversation is very helpful in this regard, because the prior work does a lot of the heavy lifting of defining, giving evidence, structuring arguments, and motivating the importance of the issue.
These are basic expectations that just about any reader worth having is going to bring to your work. It’s not obligatory to do that, but if you don’t, then your writing will have the appearance of being draft-quality work that’s more a process of getting your thoughts together, and it’s unclear why you’d expect an audience to seriously engage with that. Yet your tone here seems to imply that you do, in fact, expect readers to take your article seriously. My independent observation is that you have more work to do in order to provoke the kind of conversation that it seems you’re hoping to have, and I would bet that choosing one or more specific previous works to critique would be a good way to move toward that goal.
Can you say more about your experirences that led you to have your view of job creation? It’s not often that I talk to people who’ve had the chance to personally observe the behavior of big investors and powerful executives sufficient to overturn the fundamentals of economics. It might be interesting to hear some of those stories—it’s hard for me to envision how the personal observations of an individual could provide such powerful evidence against basic market economic principles that they’d overturn one’s whole worldview. I haven’t had this experience, and nobody I know has either, so from my point of view you are an individual with a very unusual point of view based on very unusual experiences.
Most of them are covered by a NDA, and with Guidepoint I can’t even say who I was hired by. And of course, insulting specific people I’ve worked with isn’t good business sense.
Here is a comment I made explaining why a post by Bill Gates is dumb. I have heard much dumber things than that, in conference calls and on Zoom, by people responsible for deciding what to do and by very wealthy investors deciding their investment plans.
Yes, there are public articles that say dumb things—here’s a search that will find some examples. But until you experience it in person, you naturally want to fool yourself into thinking it’s just some kind of act, that people don’t really think like that.
I also have some acquaintances in Amazon who were around for the PowerPoint ban, and got to hear about executives who were literally incapable of reading or writing memos with complex concepts. Why do you think PowerPoint slides with 5-word phrases are so common? Because that is all that many executives are able to understand about non-interpersonal object-level things.
The whole point of capitalism is that the people who have and direct money are the ones who can make good decisions about how it should be used. When you see firsthand that high-level decision-making is a farce, where does that leave you?
The whole point of capitalism is that the people who have and direct money are the ones who can make good decisions about how it should be used. When you see firsthand that high-level decision-making is a farce, where does that leave you?
I actually don’t see capitalism as being fueled primarily by good decision-making in the C suite. Instead, I think that there’s significant uncertainty around decisions at all levels of the company, and many limitations to their courses of action. Many, many businesses fail because of this.
But an existing company has been selected for having lurched its way to having robust demand, to an extent that all that uncertainty and confusion can be tolerated. There’s an incredibly powerful market signal saying MAKE THIS PRODUCT, and the company can survive and even thrive as long as it does a passable job.
But for the same reason, I don’t think that most good-paying jobs are attached to the person of wealthy individuals, and I don’t think there’s a finite number of them either. Jobs pop up in businesses that are set to fail as well as longstanding successful businesses. CEOs can’t just pack up a company and move it at the drop of a hat, much as they’d like it if they could. There’s lots of money out there looking for founders to invest in, and those founders need teams, and when those teams are successful, new companies grow, creating new jobs. And the winners get bought out, and big companies spin off little companies, and on and on. I think this is a pretty typical, mainstream view of economics.
It’s really hard for me to imagine what experiences could have lead you to think there’s just this static, finite number of jobs that rich people can take when they decide to move to a different town because too many poor people moved in. Even if most CEOs are very dumb (and I still don’t think that’s likely to be true), the zero-sum model doesn’t follow, and again—I don’t really understand the details of your zero-sum model well enough to fully understand what it is you’re proposing.
This is why I think it would be really helpful for you to make an effort to plug into a larger conversation. I appreciate and sort of believe that you’ve had experiences that would be convincing evidence of some of your claims, if only you could share them openly. But given that you can’t, you could at least look for what evidence is out in public—beyond just one letter by Bill Gates—and try to make a real case for some of the components of your worldview. If you are correct, then we all could learn from you, but it is very hard to open myself to updating my worldview very much based on the arguments and evidence you have gathered here.
There’s lots of money out there looking for founders to invest in, and those founders need teams, and when those teams are successful, new companies grow, creating new jobs.
Those investors tend to invest specifically in locations near themselves. That’s a big part of the centralizing dynamic I’m trying to explain.
And the winners get bought out
It’s easier to get bought out when you’re located closer to the buyer. And mergers often lead to the purchased company moving.
Even if most CEOs are very dumb (and I still don’t think that’s likely to be true),
Rather than saying US executives are “dumb” I’d say that they’re specialized in things that society doesn’t want them specialized in, like playing political games with other executives. Also, my experience is that “normal” people are far more impressed by MBA-speak and MBAs than engineer-speak and engineers.
effort to plug into a larger conversation
You mean...longer posts with more links in them? Here? Or what?
you could at least look for what evidence is out in public—beyond just one letter by Bill Gates—and try to make a real case for some of the components of your worldview.
It’s not really possible to do studies on this, so all I could do is point at a bunch of anecdotes, and then readers could still just say that’s cherry-picking. So, people have to estimate base rates from their personal experiences, which are biased but known not to be adversarially picked. Or, readers could assume that what’s reported by journalists/pundits is a consensus and thus more reliable. All I felt that I could do was set up a framework for people who already had evidence from their experiences.
If you are correct, then we all could learn from you, but it is very hard to open myself to updating my worldview very much based on the arguments and evidence you have gathered here.
That’s certainly understandable. At the same time, I kind of have other things to do, such as actually thinking about technology.
Is it possible that the disconnect is that you‘re valuing technical ability over being good at people+management? Most high level executives don’t need to understand these things in detail, because they have other people they trust that do understand it.
Powerpoints need to be 5-word phrases because that’s how you should communicate with crowds. And it’s not simply about reducing complexity to the lowest common denominator (though that is part of it). It’s more about how getting any team of more than a few people to do anything at all together means getting them all on the same page. And simplicity increases the likelihood that everyone will have the same take-aways, and so have the same goal.
Two motivated intelligent individuals have some decently high chance of miscommunicating about meaningful topics — increase the number to 20 and now you‘re almost guaranteed it. Put it in a presentation where everyone’s only half listening and things are even worse.
Relatedly, Bill Gates’ article wasn’t that bad. Sure, there’s some inaccuracies if you’re reading it strictly. But it’s not meant to be read strictly. It’s basically marketing material aimed at a very large crowd, which, as discussed above, requires using phrasing that gets the point across, not phrasing that is scientifically accurate when dissected.
The whole point of capitalism is that the people who have and direct money are the ones who can make good decisions about how it should be used. When you see firsthand that high-level decision-making is a farce, where does that leave you?
Is a farce compared to what? It seems like you’re comparing capitalism to some ideal that has never actually been realized. And you can’t actually know if your ideal is feasible or even better in practice unless it’s been tried.
Relatedly, Bill Gates’ article wasn’t that bad. Sure, there’s some inaccuracies if you’re reading it strictly. But it’s not meant to be read strictly. It’s basically marketing material aimed at a very large crowd, which, as discussed above, requires using phrasing that gets the point across, not phrasing that is scientifically accurate when dissected.
There are inaccuracies in the article, period. It would be embarassing for an engineer to make the mistake of conflating Celsius and Kelvin when comparing boiling point ratios, as in the claim that sodium’s boiling point is 8x higher than that of water. Bill Gates’ audience is going to have a number of technically savvy people in it, he knows it, and this alone is a college freshman/high school-level mistake. There are others.
My update on reading the article is, in fact, to downgrade my perception of Bill Gates’ technical expertise beyond the world of computer software and hardware, and to trust his ability to communicate science less.
That said, nobody needs to be an expert in every subject, and it might be that Gates’ wealth and diverse interests and fame simply put him in a position to try and interpret areas of science he’s not able to understand adequately. He’s unusual for a billionaire founder/CEO figure, and I personally wouldn’t update too much on his mistake here as evidence about the ability of other CEOs to understand their company’s specific technology to a level of depth adequate to run the business well. But I would put some probability mass into “CEOs are, in general, shockingly bad at understanding the technologies and products their company sells and they also don’t have the ability to tell who in their company does understand what their company is selling.”
Most high level executives don’t need to understand these things in detail, because they have other people they trust that do understand it.
No, they don’t. They are unable to tell the difference between technical competence and BS. That’s why Elon’s companies are relatively successful despite his autism and mediocre understanding.
Is it possible that the disconnect is that you‘re valuing technical ability over being good at people+management?
US corporate executives are now selected largely for skill at “moral mazes” and I don’t think “being good at people+management” is an entirely accurate description of that. They’re good at dealing with similar people, who—being similar—are also not good at actually doing things.
Powerpoints need to be 5-word phrases because that’s how you should communicate with crowds.
Amazon banning Powerpoint worked out pretty well for it. Maybe all the theorizing about it actually being good was just justification.
But it’s not meant to be read strictly. It’s basically marketing material aimed at a very large crowd
I’d like to believe that, but no. It was not simplification for the common people. It was an accurate overview of how Bill Gates actually understands the technology involved and why he likes it.
It seems like you’re comparing capitalism to some ideal that has never actually been realized. And you can’t actually know if your ideal is feasible or even better in practice unless it’s been tried.
I’m not suggesting copying the Chinese government, but China is doing a better job at a lot of stuff than the USA now—the USA seems to be largely coasting on past success while institutional quality declines.
If there are some particular things you think need clarification, that would be good to know too.
I think of Matt Yglesias and Noahpinion as being canonical examples of YIMBY pundits, but I’d prefer not to link to them.
Well, it’s hard to know what specifically you’re objecting to if you won’t link to them. Citing the arguments you’re criticizing is a pretty basic norm of discourse, unless you want to make an argument that these arguments are so well known that the source doesn’t matter. But I don’t think that is the case here, and even if it were, you still have to lay out your version of those arguments cleanly and clearly.
The part that I’m most skeptical of is your claim about the dynamics of job creation. You offer a vision in which a fixed number of rich people create a fixed number of jobs, which they can take with them if they leave a city. Workers compete for this fixed number of jobs, and this is what motivates them to move into big cities. That’s a rejection of econ 101, and if you’re rejecting econ 101, it makes me feel discouraged that we will have a productive discussion. What has led you to this zero-sum view of the economy?
While the title says “anti-YIMBY” what I’m trying to do here isn’t counter specific pro-YIMBY arguments, but rather to lay out an opposing position. If there are specific pro-YIMBY arguments that people then feel effectively counter that position, I can respond to those in that context.
Every notable economist situationally rejects econ 101.
It’s not that I started out with this view due to some natural tendencies, if that’s what you’re wondering. I was initially more of a libertarian and had more faith in the people running the economy. What changed my mind was observation. Getting close enough to big investors and powerful executives to see how dumb they really were. Seeing how much of the work at corporations is fake. Seeing the moral mazes. Seeing how much wealth concentration there really is. Seeing how much of the economy is driven by the whims of the ultra-wealthy, and by providing luxury services to the people who provide luxury services to them. And so on.
I understand that this is your aim. I guess what I am saying is that it does not seem like a good aim to me relative to the aim of countering specific, quotable arguments and generally making an effort to contextualize your arguments in some specific strain of discourse. I.e. cite something and respond to something.
One important reason why is that your argument is not specific or evidence-backed or carefully defined enough to agree or disagree with it, without asking you lots of additional clarifying questions. The effort of anticipating and addressing those clarifying questions is the basic work an author is expected to do. Participating in an ongoing conversation is very helpful in this regard, because the prior work does a lot of the heavy lifting of defining, giving evidence, structuring arguments, and motivating the importance of the issue.
These are basic expectations that just about any reader worth having is going to bring to your work. It’s not obligatory to do that, but if you don’t, then your writing will have the appearance of being draft-quality work that’s more a process of getting your thoughts together, and it’s unclear why you’d expect an audience to seriously engage with that. Yet your tone here seems to imply that you do, in fact, expect readers to take your article seriously. My independent observation is that you have more work to do in order to provoke the kind of conversation that it seems you’re hoping to have, and I would bet that choosing one or more specific previous works to critique would be a good way to move toward that goal.
Can you say more about your experirences that led you to have your view of job creation? It’s not often that I talk to people who’ve had the chance to personally observe the behavior of big investors and powerful executives sufficient to overturn the fundamentals of economics. It might be interesting to hear some of those stories—it’s hard for me to envision how the personal observations of an individual could provide such powerful evidence against basic market economic principles that they’d overturn one’s whole worldview. I haven’t had this experience, and nobody I know has either, so from my point of view you are an individual with a very unusual point of view based on very unusual experiences.
Most of them are covered by a NDA, and with Guidepoint I can’t even say who I was hired by. And of course, insulting specific people I’ve worked with isn’t good business sense.
Here is a comment I made explaining why a post by Bill Gates is dumb. I have heard much dumber things than that, in conference calls and on Zoom, by people responsible for deciding what to do and by very wealthy investors deciding their investment plans.
Yes, there are public articles that say dumb things—here’s a search that will find some examples. But until you experience it in person, you naturally want to fool yourself into thinking it’s just some kind of act, that people don’t really think like that.
I also have some acquaintances in Amazon who were around for the PowerPoint ban, and got to hear about executives who were literally incapable of reading or writing memos with complex concepts. Why do you think PowerPoint slides with 5-word phrases are so common? Because that is all that many executives are able to understand about non-interpersonal object-level things.
I’d also suggest reading Moral Mazes.
The whole point of capitalism is that the people who have and direct money are the ones who can make good decisions about how it should be used. When you see firsthand that high-level decision-making is a farce, where does that leave you?
I actually don’t see capitalism as being fueled primarily by good decision-making in the C suite. Instead, I think that there’s significant uncertainty around decisions at all levels of the company, and many limitations to their courses of action. Many, many businesses fail because of this.
But an existing company has been selected for having lurched its way to having robust demand, to an extent that all that uncertainty and confusion can be tolerated. There’s an incredibly powerful market signal saying MAKE THIS PRODUCT, and the company can survive and even thrive as long as it does a passable job.
But for the same reason, I don’t think that most good-paying jobs are attached to the person of wealthy individuals, and I don’t think there’s a finite number of them either. Jobs pop up in businesses that are set to fail as well as longstanding successful businesses. CEOs can’t just pack up a company and move it at the drop of a hat, much as they’d like it if they could. There’s lots of money out there looking for founders to invest in, and those founders need teams, and when those teams are successful, new companies grow, creating new jobs. And the winners get bought out, and big companies spin off little companies, and on and on. I think this is a pretty typical, mainstream view of economics.
It’s really hard for me to imagine what experiences could have lead you to think there’s just this static, finite number of jobs that rich people can take when they decide to move to a different town because too many poor people moved in. Even if most CEOs are very dumb (and I still don’t think that’s likely to be true), the zero-sum model doesn’t follow, and again—I don’t really understand the details of your zero-sum model well enough to fully understand what it is you’re proposing.
This is why I think it would be really helpful for you to make an effort to plug into a larger conversation. I appreciate and sort of believe that you’ve had experiences that would be convincing evidence of some of your claims, if only you could share them openly. But given that you can’t, you could at least look for what evidence is out in public—beyond just one letter by Bill Gates—and try to make a real case for some of the components of your worldview. If you are correct, then we all could learn from you, but it is very hard to open myself to updating my worldview very much based on the arguments and evidence you have gathered here.
Those investors tend to invest specifically in locations near themselves. That’s a big part of the centralizing dynamic I’m trying to explain.
It’s easier to get bought out when you’re located closer to the buyer. And mergers often lead to the purchased company moving.
Rather than saying US executives are “dumb” I’d say that they’re specialized in things that society doesn’t want them specialized in, like playing political games with other executives. Also, my experience is that “normal” people are far more impressed by MBA-speak and MBAs than engineer-speak and engineers.
You mean...longer posts with more links in them? Here? Or what?
It’s not really possible to do studies on this, so all I could do is point at a bunch of anecdotes, and then readers could still just say that’s cherry-picking. So, people have to estimate base rates from their personal experiences, which are biased but known not to be adversarially picked. Or, readers could assume that what’s reported by journalists/pundits is a consensus and thus more reliable. All I felt that I could do was set up a framework for people who already had evidence from their experiences.
That’s certainly understandable. At the same time, I kind of have other things to do, such as actually thinking about technology.
Is it possible that the disconnect is that you‘re valuing technical ability over being good at people+management? Most high level executives don’t need to understand these things in detail, because they have other people they trust that do understand it.
Powerpoints need to be 5-word phrases because that’s how you should communicate with crowds. And it’s not simply about reducing complexity to the lowest common denominator (though that is part of it). It’s more about how getting any team of more than a few people to do anything at all together means getting them all on the same page. And simplicity increases the likelihood that everyone will have the same take-aways, and so have the same goal.
Two motivated intelligent individuals have some decently high chance of miscommunicating about meaningful topics — increase the number to 20 and now you‘re almost guaranteed it. Put it in a presentation where everyone’s only half listening and things are even worse.
Relatedly, Bill Gates’ article wasn’t that bad. Sure, there’s some inaccuracies if you’re reading it strictly. But it’s not meant to be read strictly. It’s basically marketing material aimed at a very large crowd, which, as discussed above, requires using phrasing that gets the point across, not phrasing that is scientifically accurate when dissected.
Is a farce compared to what? It seems like you’re comparing capitalism to some ideal that has never actually been realized. And you can’t actually know if your ideal is feasible or even better in practice unless it’s been tried.
There are inaccuracies in the article, period. It would be embarassing for an engineer to make the mistake of conflating Celsius and Kelvin when comparing boiling point ratios, as in the claim that sodium’s boiling point is 8x higher than that of water. Bill Gates’ audience is going to have a number of technically savvy people in it, he knows it, and this alone is a college freshman/high school-level mistake. There are others.
My update on reading the article is, in fact, to downgrade my perception of Bill Gates’ technical expertise beyond the world of computer software and hardware, and to trust his ability to communicate science less.
That said, nobody needs to be an expert in every subject, and it might be that Gates’ wealth and diverse interests and fame simply put him in a position to try and interpret areas of science he’s not able to understand adequately. He’s unusual for a billionaire founder/CEO figure, and I personally wouldn’t update too much on his mistake here as evidence about the ability of other CEOs to understand their company’s specific technology to a level of depth adequate to run the business well. But I would put some probability mass into “CEOs are, in general, shockingly bad at understanding the technologies and products their company sells and they also don’t have the ability to tell who in their company does understand what their company is selling.”
No, they don’t. They are unable to tell the difference between technical competence and BS. That’s why Elon’s companies are relatively successful despite his autism and mediocre understanding.
US corporate executives are now selected largely for skill at “moral mazes” and I don’t think “being good at people+management” is an entirely accurate description of that. They’re good at dealing with similar people, who—being similar—are also not good at actually doing things.
Amazon banning Powerpoint worked out pretty well for it. Maybe all the theorizing about it actually being good was just justification.
I’d like to believe that, but no. It was not simplification for the common people. It was an accurate overview of how Bill Gates actually understands the technology involved and why he likes it.
I’m not suggesting copying the Chinese government, but China is doing a better job at a lot of stuff than the USA now—the USA seems to be largely coasting on past success while institutional quality declines.