This is barely literate invective. It does not belong here. That it's generating enough upvotes to get to the front page of HN is a symptom of increasing politicization that's really degrading the quality of submissions.
A proper response might be worth reading, but this is a bunch of insults attacking a poorly-constructed strawman made out of words stuffed into PG's mouth.
I'd like to offer a counterpoint to those who believe that this is simply "nonsense invective".
I think the submission is worded like the "everyman" talking, but it makes all the right counter-points.
* venture capitalism != democracy
* venture capitalism = the few get to decide what is valuable
* venture capitalism does not create wealth because existing wealth is used to legitimize "new wealth"
* venture capitalism cannot be used as the solution for everything, because in its existing form, it already undervalues things we would all care for (teachers, nurses, etc.) and overvalues things we all understand as entertainment (Candy Crush Saga)
* Paul Graham has written some very weird things -- his article then, taken holistically with the background of his other opinions, is scary
Pretty well written, I'd say. I am curious to know what words were stuffed into PG's golden mouth.
The parts claiming that PG hates the "poors" would be one example of stuffing words into his mouth. I have difficulty locating any of the points you mentioned in the article itself.
EDIT: Here's the false "distillation" of PG's essay put into quotes (i.e. stuffed into PG's mouth): "I can distill the essence of the entire argument to: “Don’t hate the player, but don’t hate the game either. Hate yourselves, stupid poors, for not getting VC funding to start a company.”"
EDIT 2:
To reply more fully, point-by-point:
* There may be some kind of actual point there in that one needs to have currency in order to 'vote' for startups. I think the point of calling it democratic is that people choose what they want rather than having it chosen for them.
* The few are becoming many with things like Kickstarter allowing just anyone to help bring things to reality, though you may have some point in that the amount of money you can bring to bear on the problem is at issue.
* "venture capitalism does not create wealth because existing wealth is used to legitimize "new wealth"" - I don't even know what you think "wealth" is, but I'm guessing your idea of it is tied up in currency (dollars, Euros, whatever). If we didn't have, say, a cure for Malaria and a startup brings us that, it's new wealth. This is separate from the amount of currency that may exist in the world or how it may flow as a result of this.
If we give everyone $1,000,000 in currency, it doesn't change the amount of actual things we have that could be buyable like, say, cars, though people might be less willing to sell them for particular amounts of currency due to inflation. So this point is completely incoherent as the two sides of it are causally unrelated and it seems not to understand the use of 'wealth' as an economic term.
* "venture capitalism cannot be used as the solution for everything" - A strawman, as nothing is given to show that PG has actually claimed that. Instead it gives us this: "The solution to poverty is as transparent as starting Google, you stupid poors. Come on! Figure Google 2 out already, you idiots."
* "Paul Graham has written some very weird things -- his article then, taken holistically with the background of his other opinions, is scary" - Fear is the "mind killer" and its effects can be seen in this piece.
I think it very much belongs here. I would agree that it has an aggressive tone but not of a thoughtless insulting nature. I think challenging others views is just what smart people do. Its especially healthy to challenge cultural icons that may have options accepted as truth simply because of their impressive reputation.
This article says that PG's article is barely literate invective. So if PG's belongs here, this one might as well be here, too. Otherwise it's a bit of a double-standard.
Wow. I was not impressed by PGs essay. He had some points, but seemed to be looking at the issue from a very narrow point of view. I gave it a 'C.' I would love to see a high quality criticism. But this? I don't know if this has any points; I couldn't get more than a few paragraphs in. As another comment put it, "barely literate invective."
My thought also. I've read many of his essays which I enjoyed very much, mostly the more technical-centric ones. But reading this essay gave me the same creeping feeling I had when I read Atlas Shrugged ... (cover to cover!). There is a certain lacking of substance and nuance which paints the world in a very coarse categories and leaves no place for anything in between. Bottom line, not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. In fact entrepeneurs NEED non-entrepreneurs (called employees). Some employees are hard working, creative, innovative people who crave something else than 'winning' at the 'free-market' game ...
I suspect that some of the insults inside this article are because the author didn't have such big reach like PG , and those might be a way to achieve that.
But a few of the main points are correct - for example, the way that silicon value measures value doesn't have a lot to do with social value.
Well that's not true though, really...Candy Crush is worth $7 billion because that's roughly the amount of money the market is willing to send Candy Crush. That's more or the less the definition of societal value - what society values something at. In this case, it values it at $7 billion.
But that's a distraction. The broader point is that these views aren't mutually incompatible. In the essay PG says it's fine to combat poverty at the expense of wealth - aka higher taxation and de facto wealth redistribution - but attacking income inequality is impossible in a society that allows people to create solutions to problems that lots of people have, because that transfer of value, again by definition, will create income inequality.
Um...how did this get upvoted so much? I mean, it's sometimes fun to watch the popcorn fly, but this was kind of tepid...I stopped at the explanation of what a VC-funded startup is. Too much telling, not enough showing (I didn't read pg's essay).
However, I was surprised that the author was offered $500 from a friend to write a post on Medium. Is writing-as-a-career back in style? I'm all for that.
I think it's possible to vehemently disagree ( as I do ) with Paul Graham on his inequality thesis, and still be logical and coherent. This article is neither. It's patent nonsense.
I actually think it's quite well written. It's not out there to dispute PG's central point. It's written to dispute the idea that Silicon Valley's engineering/business/vc minds have demonstrated skill at building anything more than an economically better future for themselves and those within the system. If it achieves that it seeks to invalidate PG's expertise. (From which much of his authority is derived. A concept familiar to Holly Wood as she is a sociologist.) It also criticizes his breadth of knowledge in the subject area, something an academic would be in a position to comment on. (I'd love to hear from an economist or another social scientist on whether PG's suppositions reflect the broader literature.)
Getting back to the article's main attack- It does so by making a logical, if emotion filled, attack. Venture capitalism is still capitalism. Participants work to, primarily, their own economic benefit rather than the benefit of society. (Yes, it's the worst system except for all the rest, but it still doesn't make the most long term beneficial allocations. See: poor funding for fundamental science research.)
Moreover the article criticizes PG (citing his lack of perspective) for promoting a "bootstraps" ideology. It tries to illustrate that the ideology is flawed in two ways: 1. The people who could most benefit don't necessarily have the personal capital (time, knowledge, etc.) to effectively run a startup.
2. It implies that there is only so much problem space that can be effectively addressed at any given time.
This is written in the style of a qualitative sociology monograph. I find it quite compelling, however, I'm not surprised that the crowd here doesn't share my view.
Plenty of paragraphs that are utter nonsense. Example:
"First of all, over 95% of startups fail. Every venture capitalist knows this. Those pesky things, for the most part, just eat money and more often than not actually destroy wealth.
But the second reason why you should not allow yourself to think that startups create wealth is because of how they are funded."
This is nonsense that displays utter lack of understanding of startups, venture capital, economics, finance. To refute it, I would have to start with an Econ 101 lecture, followed by a lecture on basic statistics and probability distributions. In short, it's just incoherent nonsense
I'd love to hear it, because it took me a quick Google search to find numbers for startup failure from 80%-95% cited. (Much higher than the 48.8% I found for small business failure rate.)
Moreover, I'd be interested if anyone has actually done a comprehensive study on total value (long-term economic and short term investor profits) added/lost from startups. I wouldn't be surprised if we found something that looks net/net negative or even pretty small.[1] (That is startups globally, not just VC funded or SV startups.)
If startups are engines of wealth re-allocations rather than drivers of long term economic benefit. Well, then silicon valley is just as bad as Wall Street.
[1] We're quick to count the successes, but struggle to count the failures. More than that, many startups, as the author points out, are entertainment companies that don't add much economically. Finally, how much money is churned out of investable capital into acqui-hires? How much of that delivers a meaningful return vs. defending a market position?
Well, the startups that don't fail generate financial returns that far outweigh lost capital from faulures. But value isn't just returns to investors, it's value for customers and employees which even failed startups generate
But more importantly, you don't get to make claims that you can't substantiate and then ask others to prove to you they are false. Do you think Zeus is real? No? Well, prove to me he isn't. If you claim startups don't create value without actual evidence to back that statement up - that's a nonsensical way to converse
My evidence is not high quality, but it's evidence. Just because I don't have higher quality evidence at hand doesn't make it true. The sky is blue. You can disagree, but where I sit it looks blue.
I claimed my point and my evidence centers on failure rate and personal observation. You can disagree or choose to maintain your own anecdotal/limited evidence. Neither hypothesis is proven invalid until clear high quality evidence is provided.
I find your strawman distasteful bordering on offensive.
Failure rate is in no way any evidence of whether or not startups create value. Failure rate of drug discovery is also high, would you say drug discovery doesn't create value? I'm sorry if you feel offended but I'm not trying to offend you personally, I'm just pointing out that it is a nonsensical way to converse, to offer up claims that make no sense outside of personal observation
I'm not claiming that failure rate is the sole value destruction mechanism. Rather that it is one. The other, perhaps more pernicious, mechanism is solving problems with little to no long term social benefit. (i.e. much entertainment)
Your point about drug discovery helps illustrate the second item. If most of the drugs being pursued were cosmetic in nature, we could challenge the long term benefit of drug discovery.
I appreciate the apology, but that's part of my frustration. My claims do have some grounds for validity and consideration. They have a rational basis.
I don't see the rational basis. You keep repeating it exists but at no point have you explained how it follows that a failure rate of startups in any way whatsoever to any degree at all leads to them not creating any value. You have simply assumed this link - that's nonsensical
In fact, simple economics teaches us that a high failure rate is a good thing. Low failure rate would be consistent with very low risk projects that tend to be about some form of rent seeking or regulatory arbitrage. High failure rate means people are actually working on things that are hard to do. That's very valuable
If a new drug to cure something is discovered, we have a new drug no matter how many other startups fail and people who might have died are cured by it.
This is completely independent of what other people are doing, or whether other people have, say, failed music startups / failed websites that fail at whatever rate.
I'd say that startups can create wealth though, as 'value' is either tied to currency or not objective at all, and funny business with numbers isn't the most important thing in life.
There was a research .in 2010 measuring a decrease of 40% in empathy among college students since 2000[1]. And Israeli researcher who talks with teens everyday and deals with those subject recently did an interview in an Israeli newspaper , and he thinks that the cause is smartphones and social media. He frames this as "our children are becoming less human".
If you add that into the calculation, it could be that the total value of all internet startups, Paul Graham's specialty , is greatly negative, and they're not just silly entertainment.
Teenagers have little face to face time , and a lot of social media time , due to the addictiveness of smartphones, and various social media apps and probably various games -mostly created in silicon valley.
Face to face time is where you learn emotional intelligence and empathy. A simple example: usually in real life , when you hurt someone , you see him getting hurt and you might feel ashamed. Social media lacks that.
That's an interesting theory. How would you test it to prove (or disprove) it? Would you predict that it would change as video chat becomes more commonplace? Why or why not?
It says "little negative effects for online usage, except for gaming both for males and females", but the other thing it says - "little decrease in face to face time" contradicts other research that talks about greatly decreased face-to-face time :
As for changing to video chat - i'm sure that would help(to some extent, and depending on video chat quality [things like eye contact]) but the weird question is - how do you make face to face chat as addictive as facebook/reddit/HN ?
You might find your posts to be more persuasive if you started advancing an actual argument rather than trying to see how many times you can type “nonsense”. You might not agree with Holly Wood but she at least stated several ideas which can be debated, whereas your statement has nothing except an unsupported assertion that we should trust your authoritative judgement.
95% of books are not good, therefore writing books creates no value. The article makes a similar claim, but there is no mechanism that connects the part before therefore with the part after - it's assumed to be self evident. But that's nonsense. If you make such a claim, the onus is on you to explain how is it that failure rate, whatever it is, leads to value being not X, not Y, but <= zero
That doesn't seem relevant to the discussion at hand in the absence of a publisher claiming that the entire world should run like a publishing house with poor quality standards and telling everyone that their only sure path to success comes from writing books.
Your response does, however, nicely illustrate the problem: if someone went around telling kids that they should quit school, put everything into becoming NBA stars, hit musicians, etc. they'd rightly be mocked. When similar claims are made by Silicon Valley VCs, however, they're taken far more seriously despite not being much more realistic in practice.
Similarly, there are the costs to others from startup-style churn: people losing jobs due to VC-mandated unsound business plans or replacing many jobs with automation. To be clear, that isn't automatically wrong but definitely has a real measurable cost to society which many people prefer not to take seriously. Holly Wood might not have captured every detail of that debate but she's doing a great job of reminding us that we shouldn't forget it exists.
I'm specifically questioning nonsensical claims that startups create no value made by Holly Wood. I'm not sure what you are even talking about. Who is telling everyone to quit school and what does that have to do with any of this ?
Peter Thiel advocated for everyone not to go to college ? I think he advocated that college may not be the necessary for some people. But, I don't see what that has to do with the discussion at hand
Did you like Thiel's 'women have ruined everything' polemic in 2009 ?
"The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women - two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians - have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron."
I don't know, I don't agree with the article but I don't think it is a stretch to say something like "95% of startups fail, everyone knows this;" I don't know what the actual percentage is but I think this comports generally with reality and what most people understand.
Also, many people, even startup founders see VCs as somewhat predatory, even founders that are very fondly though in the HN community.
i also think it's also possible to disagree on some points.
moreover, i think a lot of the people that disagree do not have the time to fully research the issue that some people do or the platform to be heard that pg has.
finally, i would point out that pg's argument is not entirely based on logic. using phrases like "shooting at poverty" and "pie in the sky thinking" mark the original text as what it is: an opinion piece, not a research paper.
EDIT: there are citations. to make a (probably) logically true statement given assumptions that a large percentage of people can agree with, it's not a peer-reviewed research paper, except whatever measure of peer-review posts on medium, here, and elsewhere provide.
for all i know, some economists proof-read the thing, and if so, i'd like to know which ones.
The post is a great example of how the term "value" is misunderstood. Value in the context of startups (Lean's definition) is not the same value when I talk about a nurse's or school teacher's work. The distinction is subtle, and when the subtly is missed can lead to anger because it feels as though a kind of value is being devalued.
Yes she perfectly understands the difference. The problem she is attacking is that in Silicon Valley, people pave over the difference and act as if creating wealth is in and of itself creating both kinds of value.
Given two technically and aesthetically identical products A and B, if A manages to get significantly more funding, better management and outreach, it will probably sell more. We would say that the market thinks that A is more valuable. But A and B are identical products, so where is the difference in value coming from?
I think funding, management and outreach all depend on human resources behind the product, most importantly, the team of founders. They have to get the funding, manage the company and communicate well to customers. If the founders are "high value", they can imbibe the product with some of this "value".
A system of computing values, which includes this "human value" is problematic. In this system, the value of the Nazi philosophy, let's say, would depend on the person propagating it. A charismatic leader like Hitler brainwashed a lot of people into believing its legitimacy, thereby increasing the value of the philosophy. The same philosophy, in the hands of someone else, might not have gained any foothold.
When we talk about equal opportunity, we talk about resources like money. But human resource can also play a huge impact in determining the value of a product. I do not know what the definition of equal opportunity in the context of "human value" should be. It is clear that a certain class of people possess more "human value" than others, and there is an inequality because of this. The question is : where does this value/inequality arise from? And should society continue including this in the computation of value, or should we construct rules where this value is suppressed?
In summary, the market is not a detached entity judging value, but it can be influenced by "high value" people to go in a certain direction.
Another name for that "human value" you discuss would be "influence." I don't know of any system immune to that. Some proposals, like the one in China to have a "social currency" system (i.e. the government gives you money for promoting their ideals) seem more likely to promote the value of influence rather than decreasing it so I'm not even sure if there's an agreement over whether it's good or bad. Honestly, I suspect it depends on the positions of the person with it: that is, people will be unhappy when people they don't agree with have a lot of influence and happy when people they do agree with have a lot of influence.
Yes, influence is a closely related concept. However, I think of influence more as an effect of "human value" rather than being the value itself. An example : Mark Zuckerberg did not have significant influence before he started Facebook. But he had the value even before he started Facebook. This "value" I am talking of comprises of , among other things, peers, habits, worldview, drive, social understanding etc. of the person in question.
While I can't say this is the best written essay I've ever read, I do find it telling that most of the commenters would rather dismiss the piece as "barely literate invective" than engage with the arguments it advances.
If you don't have anything to contribute beyond an angry critique of the author's writing style, then maybe you should sit the discussion out.
However, I have trouble engaging with the arguments when I can't even read far enough to figure out what they are. The article starts out by calling PG names and then throwing up straw men. It almost seems designed to piss me off enough to stop reading . . . and that was my point.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadwhen PG referred to a quote by Stieglitz as "pie in the sky" thinking, tho, I thought, "maybe out of his depth"
Yes, how strange it is that when PG posts a particularly inflammatory piece about income inequality people might want to respond to it.
I think the submission is worded like the "everyman" talking, but it makes all the right counter-points.
* venture capitalism != democracy
* venture capitalism = the few get to decide what is valuable
* venture capitalism does not create wealth because existing wealth is used to legitimize "new wealth"
* venture capitalism cannot be used as the solution for everything, because in its existing form, it already undervalues things we would all care for (teachers, nurses, etc.) and overvalues things we all understand as entertainment (Candy Crush Saga)
* Paul Graham has written some very weird things -- his article then, taken holistically with the background of his other opinions, is scary
Pretty well written, I'd say. I am curious to know what words were stuffed into PG's golden mouth.
EDIT: Here's the false "distillation" of PG's essay put into quotes (i.e. stuffed into PG's mouth): "I can distill the essence of the entire argument to: “Don’t hate the player, but don’t hate the game either. Hate yourselves, stupid poors, for not getting VC funding to start a company.”"
EDIT 2: To reply more fully, point-by-point:
* There may be some kind of actual point there in that one needs to have currency in order to 'vote' for startups. I think the point of calling it democratic is that people choose what they want rather than having it chosen for them.
* The few are becoming many with things like Kickstarter allowing just anyone to help bring things to reality, though you may have some point in that the amount of money you can bring to bear on the problem is at issue.
* "venture capitalism does not create wealth because existing wealth is used to legitimize "new wealth"" - I don't even know what you think "wealth" is, but I'm guessing your idea of it is tied up in currency (dollars, Euros, whatever). If we didn't have, say, a cure for Malaria and a startup brings us that, it's new wealth. This is separate from the amount of currency that may exist in the world or how it may flow as a result of this.
If we give everyone $1,000,000 in currency, it doesn't change the amount of actual things we have that could be buyable like, say, cars, though people might be less willing to sell them for particular amounts of currency due to inflation. So this point is completely incoherent as the two sides of it are causally unrelated and it seems not to understand the use of 'wealth' as an economic term.
* "venture capitalism cannot be used as the solution for everything" - A strawman, as nothing is given to show that PG has actually claimed that. Instead it gives us this: "The solution to poverty is as transparent as starting Google, you stupid poors. Come on! Figure Google 2 out already, you idiots."
* "Paul Graham has written some very weird things -- his article then, taken holistically with the background of his other opinions, is scary" - Fear is the "mind killer" and its effects can be seen in this piece.
But a few of the main points are correct - for example, the way that silicon value measures value doesn't have a lot to do with social value.
But that's a distraction. The broader point is that these views aren't mutually incompatible. In the essay PG says it's fine to combat poverty at the expense of wealth - aka higher taxation and de facto wealth redistribution - but attacking income inequality is impossible in a society that allows people to create solutions to problems that lots of people have, because that transfer of value, again by definition, will create income inequality.
However, I was surprised that the author was offered $500 from a friend to write a post on Medium. Is writing-as-a-career back in style? I'm all for that.
Getting back to the article's main attack- It does so by making a logical, if emotion filled, attack. Venture capitalism is still capitalism. Participants work to, primarily, their own economic benefit rather than the benefit of society. (Yes, it's the worst system except for all the rest, but it still doesn't make the most long term beneficial allocations. See: poor funding for fundamental science research.)
Moreover the article criticizes PG (citing his lack of perspective) for promoting a "bootstraps" ideology. It tries to illustrate that the ideology is flawed in two ways: 1. The people who could most benefit don't necessarily have the personal capital (time, knowledge, etc.) to effectively run a startup. 2. It implies that there is only so much problem space that can be effectively addressed at any given time.
This is written in the style of a qualitative sociology monograph. I find it quite compelling, however, I'm not surprised that the crowd here doesn't share my view.
"First of all, over 95% of startups fail. Every venture capitalist knows this. Those pesky things, for the most part, just eat money and more often than not actually destroy wealth. But the second reason why you should not allow yourself to think that startups create wealth is because of how they are funded."
This is nonsense that displays utter lack of understanding of startups, venture capital, economics, finance. To refute it, I would have to start with an Econ 101 lecture, followed by a lecture on basic statistics and probability distributions. In short, it's just incoherent nonsense
Moreover, I'd be interested if anyone has actually done a comprehensive study on total value (long-term economic and short term investor profits) added/lost from startups. I wouldn't be surprised if we found something that looks net/net negative or even pretty small.[1] (That is startups globally, not just VC funded or SV startups.)
If startups are engines of wealth re-allocations rather than drivers of long term economic benefit. Well, then silicon valley is just as bad as Wall Street.
[1] We're quick to count the successes, but struggle to count the failures. More than that, many startups, as the author points out, are entertainment companies that don't add much economically. Finally, how much money is churned out of investable capital into acqui-hires? How much of that delivers a meaningful return vs. defending a market position?
I claimed my point and my evidence centers on failure rate and personal observation. You can disagree or choose to maintain your own anecdotal/limited evidence. Neither hypothesis is proven invalid until clear high quality evidence is provided.
I find your strawman distasteful bordering on offensive.
Your point about drug discovery helps illustrate the second item. If most of the drugs being pursued were cosmetic in nature, we could challenge the long term benefit of drug discovery.
I appreciate the apology, but that's part of my frustration. My claims do have some grounds for validity and consideration. They have a rational basis.
In fact, simple economics teaches us that a high failure rate is a good thing. Low failure rate would be consistent with very low risk projects that tend to be about some form of rent seeking or regulatory arbitrage. High failure rate means people are actually working on things that are hard to do. That's very valuable
This is completely independent of what other people are doing, or whether other people have, say, failed music startups / failed websites that fail at whatever rate.
I'd say that startups can create wealth though, as 'value' is either tied to currency or not objective at all, and funny business with numbers isn't the most important thing in life.
If you add that into the calculation, it could be that the total value of all internet startups, Paul Graham's specialty , is greatly negative, and they're not just silly entertainment.
[1]https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/born-love/201005/shocke...
Face to face time is where you learn emotional intelligence and empathy. A simple example: usually in real life , when you hurt someone , you see him getting hurt and you might feel ashamed. Social media lacks that.
http://www.csudh.edu/psych/Virtual_empathy_-_Positive_and_ne...
It says "little negative effects for online usage, except for gaming both for males and females", but the other thing it says - "little decrease in face to face time" contradicts other research that talks about greatly decreased face-to-face time :
http://www.studentpulse.com/articles/1137/the-effect-of-tech...
So it does require more research.
As for changing to video chat - i'm sure that would help(to some extent, and depending on video chat quality [things like eye contact]) but the weird question is - how do you make face to face chat as addictive as facebook/reddit/HN ?
Your response does, however, nicely illustrate the problem: if someone went around telling kids that they should quit school, put everything into becoming NBA stars, hit musicians, etc. they'd rightly be mocked. When similar claims are made by Silicon Valley VCs, however, they're taken far more seriously despite not being much more realistic in practice.
Similarly, there are the costs to others from startup-style churn: people losing jobs due to VC-mandated unsound business plans or replacing many jobs with automation. To be clear, that isn't automatically wrong but definitely has a real measurable cost to society which many people prefer not to take seriously. Holly Wood might not have captured every detail of that debate but she's doing a great job of reminding us that we shouldn't forget it exists.
"The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women - two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians - have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron."
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education...
Also, many people, even startup founders see VCs as somewhat predatory, even founders that are very fondly though in the HN community.
moreover, i think a lot of the people that disagree do not have the time to fully research the issue that some people do or the platform to be heard that pg has.
finally, i would point out that pg's argument is not entirely based on logic. using phrases like "shooting at poverty" and "pie in the sky thinking" mark the original text as what it is: an opinion piece, not a research paper.
EDIT: there are citations. to make a (probably) logically true statement given assumptions that a large percentage of people can agree with, it's not a peer-reviewed research paper, except whatever measure of peer-review posts on medium, here, and elsewhere provide.
for all i know, some economists proof-read the thing, and if so, i'd like to know which ones.
This is part of the thesis, the manner in which capital forwarded by VCs into startups, shape this dysfunction.
I think funding, management and outreach all depend on human resources behind the product, most importantly, the team of founders. They have to get the funding, manage the company and communicate well to customers. If the founders are "high value", they can imbibe the product with some of this "value".
A system of computing values, which includes this "human value" is problematic. In this system, the value of the Nazi philosophy, let's say, would depend on the person propagating it. A charismatic leader like Hitler brainwashed a lot of people into believing its legitimacy, thereby increasing the value of the philosophy. The same philosophy, in the hands of someone else, might not have gained any foothold.
When we talk about equal opportunity, we talk about resources like money. But human resource can also play a huge impact in determining the value of a product. I do not know what the definition of equal opportunity in the context of "human value" should be. It is clear that a certain class of people possess more "human value" than others, and there is an inequality because of this. The question is : where does this value/inequality arise from? And should society continue including this in the computation of value, or should we construct rules where this value is suppressed?
In summary, the market is not a detached entity judging value, but it can be influenced by "high value" people to go in a certain direction.
If you don't have anything to contribute beyond an angry critique of the author's writing style, then maybe you should sit the discussion out.
However, I have trouble engaging with the arguments when I can't even read far enough to figure out what they are. The article starts out by calling PG names and then throwing up straw men. It almost seems designed to piss me off enough to stop reading . . . and that was my point.