I don’t think anybody questions the fact that the “elite” (i.e the wealthy) are conservative. The 1% generally are. But the rest of the population of Silicon Valley generally aren’t.
>College-age tech students poised to enter the Silicon Valley ranks overwhelmingly responded like their millionaire idols: liberal on social issues, staunchly conservative on regulation.
The word libertarian has been wrongfully stolen by capitalist, yes. Same with a term like anarcho-capitalism, which has nothing to do with anarchism, an ideology which is always staunchly anti-capitalist.
You have it backwards. Liberal economics means fewer regulations, less federal planning, etc. In their more "socialist" phases, China and India had the government in control of a lot of manufacturing, trade, etc. After their economies were liberalized, private companies had a greater say in their own affairs (they got "liberated"). In India, the government started selling off its factories to private owners under a liberal economic regime.
While I agree with you in the main, many economic liberals would still support government intervention to stop oligopolies, monopolies or monopsonies. They support free markets and individual choice, not just privatisation or corporatisation for the sake of it.
Funnily enough, that person does not have it backwards. It's the _article_ and the terminology it uses from the USA that have it backwards. This is revealed by the fact that the article claims that Silicon Valley's elite are both "staunchly conservative on regulation" and have "anti-regulatory zeal".
So you're actually agreeing vigorously with the guy to whom you're responding.
Definitely not agreeing with GP. Progressives are not economic liberals. But you're right, the article has it backwards too. The phrase "staunchly conservative on regulation" seems to have a special meaning in the US that's not applicable elsewhere. In India and Pakistan, for example, "conservative" just means holding on to traditional religious values.
They are under the American meaning of the word liberal, you just don't understand what liberal means in America. You are agreeing with me whether you understand it or not. What you mean by liberal, we call conservative or "classical liberal".
Liberal here doesn't mean what it means in the rest of the world.
> In India and Pakistan, for example, "conservative" just means holding on to traditional religious values.
And I see no problem with that. Why would being liberal mean to support extreme leftist regulatory policy here? Why would we consider, letting those government officials, who may not have the expertise understanding the subject at hand, in this case technology, dictate how business should run and put harness on it, as part of the package of being liberal?
Corporations have proven these past hundreds of years that they are completely unwilling to act in a way that is remotely moral or beneficial for the greater good. And yet people continue to go “no we should let them poison the earth for their profit! We should allow them to underpay people and let society pick up the difference! We should allow them to pay politicians to make rules that benefit them! Because rules are bad!”. It’s baffling.
While I haven't worked in SV yet, my experience across the tech sector has been somewhat similar. Developers tend to be socially liberal in a few areas but strongly conservative when it comes to issues of regulation, taxation and so forth.
A lot of that is I believe because they tend to come from upper-middle class families or relatively more stable upbringings. It can make discussing some of the various social issues difficult because they've been in a well-insulated bubble most of their life and they're not as familiar with the depths of extreme poverty or working class families as I am.
I don’t know how to write this without being too defensive, but the place where you think other peoples’ opinions come from seems incorrect and is borderline insulting, mainly bringing them down to prop yourself up. Maybe it’s not your intent.
What's insulting about saying someone from a middle class background (presumably in the United States) is "not as familiar with the depths of extreme poverty or working class families as I am."
To me, this sounds like a shared opinion based on personal experience.
It was said in a different direction. People who hold political opinion X must be from this background because they don’t understand the issue like I do.
I’m from a working class background and arrived at a different conclusion in my own experience. But I get lumped in with people raised upper middle class just because I couldn’t possibly have such opinions. Granted, this is why I try not to be defensive about it: who I am doesn’t really matter (nor should it for anyone else) when we’re discussing ideas.
Can you define 'working class family'? Because for me, my definition of working class was living in deep poverty as the result of my family working an incredibly hard yet unrewarding career path that physically and mentally destroyed them.
As I bring up often, my parents were fishermen. They could hardly afford a home and hardly afford to put food on the table or the immense medical bills we were saddled with.
I agree with what you're saying about the tone of fzeroracer's comment, but as someone who comes from extreme poverty, there's a lot of truth there. There's a lot to poverty that can't be explained in a tweet storm or a TED talk, and a lot of what I know to be very real causes of poverty are often dismissed as political narratives.
If you find something as benign as me bringing up my anecdotal experiences so far 'borderline insulting', then you remind me a lot of my coworkers I've had to deal with in the past.
Bringing up my past and my opinions was enough to get them riled up because they simply could not understand where I came from or the things I had to deal with due to poverty. I don't know how else you think I should explain this other than the fact that we had two very different circumstances growing up.
As an alternative perspective: perhaps discussing the social issues is more difficult because their immediate self-interest (and that of their families) lies towards lower taxation, less regulation, and so on. In my experience, all people tend to protect what is theirs first, although they will cloak this intent behind language that makes it more ambiguous. Appealing to people's sympathy just isn't an effective strategy, as humans aren't actually as charitable as we pretend to be.
If you can convince people that their long-term self-interest must include the broader community, you may be more likely to get somewhere than pointing out the challenges experienced by other people. In any case, you're unlikely to make any headway against people who are buying private islands and have "escape plans" to get them out of the country. (These people already understand the risk and believe they have factored that into their decisions.)
Quit spreading right wing propaganda and talking points here. Hacker News isn’t for political discussion and you’re just making a false equivalency and repeating Fox News lines (college students all think the same!)
The right wing donors like Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson far outspend the left and have organizations like ALEC to which there is no left wing equivalent. Data is here so you don’t have to make shit up: https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/03/richest-billionaire...
>According to Open Secrets, Republicans had a larger share of the billionaires -- and their contributions to outside spending groups -- in the 2012 election cycle. Among the top 100 donors in the Open Secrets list, 33 were billionaires, and of those, 14 gave primarily to liberal groups while 19 gave to conservative groups.
>In addition, the top 100 donors of 2012 gave 41 percent of all the money collected by outside spending groups, and of their donations, 71 percent went to conservative groups.
> Research found that the tech elites responded with the same anti-regulatory zeal when questioned about other industries as well, as in a question about whether florists should be able to raise prices on flowers during holiday seasons.
Odd that one would hold a price control law as particularly 'liberal'. Anti-regulatory zeal is perfectly in line with Liberalism. Perhaps it is the names in the US that have diverged from the original meaning.
The so-called socially liberal, fiscally conservative is just Liberalism as conceived of by Locke and gang.
I see SV is generally very socially liberal, but when it comes to monetary policy, the ideology behind it is still neoliberalism, thus their attitude towards regulation isn't really hard to understand.
And under the risk of downvotes, I do think neoliberalism makes SV the SV it is today, the industry exists because of it. Whether it will keep working or not it is a different matter on its own, but that people tend to cling on and won't let go what has been working isn't really that of a surprise.
I wonder if those who participated would give the same responses on Twitter as they gave in private emails. In all communities (liberal or conservative), there's a strong pressure to conform.
This is just a question of labels. Maybe having just two parties is what creates the habit of dividing all the political ideas in two camps. But that's absurdly reductionist.
The social-democracy has wandered worldwide from its economical foundation to another set of causes: ecologism, feminism and identity politics. In the USA the democrats are holding, but in Europe most socialist parties are having a bad time.
Now Hillary (news that have been downvoted here to death) says that maybe inmigration should be curbed to avoid the raising of populism.
Seems like a weird juxtaposition to me that the word “liberal” is being used to imply the support of more government regulations when by definition those restrictions are restricting someone’s freedoms (sometimes for the best IMO).
It reminds me of the old Norm MacDonald joke where because of abortions and the death penalty, there’s no way for him to vote for a party where nobody is killed.
Liberalism is always against an axis. As such, there are two different factors in liberalism, Social and Economic. The so-called liberals in America Liberals are socially liberal but economically conservative. While American conservatives are economically liberal but socially conservative.
A number of them refer to themselves as "classical liberals" in an attempt to reclaim the continental definition of liberal, but in the US media at least it feels like the definition has permanently shifted. This makes it awfully confusing when discussing US politics internationally. (Maybe one day we'll align our language with the rest of the world, and maybe one day we'll adopt the metric system too.)
Yes. The common use of the word Liberal means Progressive. Progressives, while sounding like they want progress, want regulation of anything they don't like. They want to regulate speech. They want to regulate the energy source that would have prevented Global Warming, nuclear. The list goes on. Welcome to the Liberals of modernity.
My observations don't align with yours, though your writing is possibly emotionally driven. I don't think "progressives", on average, want to legally regulate nuclear power and speech in harmful ways. But mostly, I don't understand the implication that progress as in "progressive" is mutually exclusive from regulation. Can you clarify where that comes from?
Let's take nuclear. Jimmy Carter and the Liberals of his age were against recycling of fuel. They regulated that all spent fuel had to be stored in a super complex system that protected humanity from the fuel. The regulations are so onerous that to this day many power plants in the US are stockpiling their spent fuel because we can't build a facility that actually satisfies the requirements due to other regulations.
Another example, the Liberals want to ban hate speech. When pressed the definition of hate speech is any speech that contradicts their own. They don't hold to the Enlightenment ideal of discussing radical views. Instead, if anyone appeals to science, hard science, that disagrees with one of their many incoherent points, that person is banned from the Academy.
Finally, take SF. This city likes to describe itself as one of the most Liberal in the country. Those same Liberals have effectively priced out the majority of middle-class Americans. You know? The one they supposedly love. They did this through zoning regulations. Buildings can only be so tall. You can have only so many families per unit. They can only exist in certain locations. All of the regulation adds up to the problems SF faces today.
In a general sense, there is also the moral regulations the modern Liberals put on us. They continue to enforce the plantation on the black population, and will for decades to come. Liberals hold blacks as perpetual children. They need welfare because they are poorly educated and oppressed by the white man. Now step back and you'll see that they are oppressed by whites: white liberals. For 60 years or more Liberal cities like Chicago, LA, New York all have done nothing to improve the lots of blacks. They are kept as subsistence levels. Those Liberal bastions could have improved housing. They could have improved education. They could have withheld resources to force a change in the individual to learn and improve. They have done nothing. Like children, they shouldn't marry. The Liberals have rigged the welfare laws at all levels to destroy the home by excluding the father. Again, the list goes on. I leave it to reader to research this on their own.
this second comment is much more constructive than your first one, because you criticized specific policies for their results. let's keep putting aside the tribal and partisan language and come together to brainstorm and debate solutions.
and yes, we need to ease nuclear regulations, protect all speech, and fix regulations around housing (including the regulation of interest rates through freddie/fannie).
a key fix to everything you said about the suppression of black folks (and most of the rest of us) is a return to a progressive tax system. a few decades ago, the US taxed the 1% at up to 90%, didn't have a separate capital gains tax, had an inheritance tax that encouraged industry, and didn't have corporate tax shields (along with encouraging immigration). and thus we prospered.
a few decades ago, the US taxed the 1% at up to 90%
Almost six decades ago. (Meanwhile, it was 95% in England).
The original driver of reducing rates in the US? John F. Kennedy. There's a great speech he gave before The Commonwealth Club on this very subject; audio is available online.
I am a „liberal“ German and I really have a hard time to translate that correctly. I am neither conservative, liberal nor libertarian. German „liberalism“ and how it is seen in most countries is a distinct mix of all of them, but not in the extremist sense: while we european liberals like to be conservative in private, we accept and promote civil liberties (including abolishing death penalty and being allowed to smoke marijuana) and still want much less government and taxes (yet we do not hate the government as the libertarians do).
You may still fall under the US definition of libertarian, which is a fairly broad spectrum. There is a split within libertarians, which used to be denoted by so-called "big L" Libertarians (Libertarian Party) and "small l" libertarians, but I haven't seen those terms mentioned as much lately. In general US libertarianism is a spectrum like any other political ideology, and you'll see people who represent extreme versions of it (think "muh roads" meme), some who fall more toward the traditional classical liberal position, and some who are more left leaning (communitarianism and neigboring groups, some Greens as well).
I think because we only have two major parties here, outlying groups tend to mix together more, even when they have substantial disagreements in their philosophy. As a whole, we are also less well-educated about alternative political systems, which makes the discussion more confusing for everyone involved.
Rich American economic conservative: The government shouldn't regulate industry. Rich American economic liberal: The government should regulate industry except mine.
It shouldn’t be a secret that the most fundamental political division of modern times is between labor and caapital, and that Silicon Valley culture is squarely on the side of capital.
The framing of the conflict as being labor vs capital rests on the assumption that the economy is at Pareto optimality. The tech industry's narrative is the opposite: it assumes that there are still inefficiencies which can be removed, to the eventual mutual benefit of both capital AND labor.
I think what's happening is somewhere between the two extremes: the pie is still getting larger, but labor's slice of the pie is diminishing at such a rate that it's barely growing at all.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 43.0 ms ] threadDo it for all CS majors and I’ll be more interested.
That's what liberal actually means. To be liberal in both areas it to be a progressive.
No it isn't, and in the era of social justice warriors, it's relevance is on the rise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalism
So you're actually agreeing vigorously with the guy to whom you're responding.
They are under the American meaning of the word liberal, you just don't understand what liberal means in America. You are agreeing with me whether you understand it or not. What you mean by liberal, we call conservative or "classical liberal".
Liberal here doesn't mean what it means in the rest of the world.
> In India and Pakistan, for example, "conservative" just means holding on to traditional religious values.
That's not what it means here.
> Liberal economics means fewer regulations, less federal planning, etc.
Not in America, here we call that conservative. In America, liberal economics mean more central planning and government control and more regulations.
Too bad the party is so weird and dysfunctional (and subject to a first-past-the-post voting system in the US), it could have a lot of support.
So have many governments.
Even well intentioned regulations have unintended side effects.
You really couldn't find a worse time to defend the government caring about morality or greater good under current administration.
A lot of that is I believe because they tend to come from upper-middle class families or relatively more stable upbringings. It can make discussing some of the various social issues difficult because they've been in a well-insulated bubble most of their life and they're not as familiar with the depths of extreme poverty or working class families as I am.
To me, this sounds like a shared opinion based on personal experience.
I’m from a working class background and arrived at a different conclusion in my own experience. But I get lumped in with people raised upper middle class just because I couldn’t possibly have such opinions. Granted, this is why I try not to be defensive about it: who I am doesn’t really matter (nor should it for anyone else) when we’re discussing ideas.
He didn't say they must come from there.
I’d love to see some data.
Of course if you work at the kind of companies that only hire people with a top CS degree then you might be led to believe that.
In my experience though it’s not the case. The majority of people in my office grew up lower middle class.
My parents were cleaners and although we were often tight on money we were miles away from extreme poverty.
Can you confirm whether you grew up in an environment of extreme poverty?
As I bring up often, my parents were fishermen. They could hardly afford a home and hardly afford to put food on the table or the immense medical bills we were saddled with.
Bringing up my past and my opinions was enough to get them riled up because they simply could not understand where I came from or the things I had to deal with due to poverty. I don't know how else you think I should explain this other than the fact that we had two very different circumstances growing up.
If you can convince people that their long-term self-interest must include the broader community, you may be more likely to get somewhere than pointing out the challenges experienced by other people. In any case, you're unlikely to make any headway against people who are buying private islands and have "escape plans" to get them out of the country. (These people already understand the risk and believe they have factored that into their decisions.)
That doesn't match what the study claimed. At the very least, they found SV "elites" and students to be for liberal taxation policies.
The right wing donors like Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson far outspend the left and have organizations like ALEC to which there is no left wing equivalent. Data is here so you don’t have to make shit up: https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/03/richest-billionaire...
>According to Open Secrets, Republicans had a larger share of the billionaires -- and their contributions to outside spending groups -- in the 2012 election cycle. Among the top 100 donors in the Open Secrets list, 33 were billionaires, and of those, 14 gave primarily to liberal groups while 19 gave to conservative groups.
>In addition, the top 100 donors of 2012 gave 41 percent of all the money collected by outside spending groups, and of their donations, 71 percent went to conservative groups.
From: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2014/jun/23...
Another relevant source: https://billmoyers.com/2014/04/10/nothing-really-compares-to...
You can read Dark Money by Jane Meyer if you are actually interested in this.
Nobody cares because you want the money, the infrastructure, the university, the network, the lead investor
Wow a wealthy person with no input from the rest of society nor any consequences, STOP THE PRESSES, except dont, it comes with the territory
Is that actually a law somewhere?
The so-called socially liberal, fiscally conservative is just Liberalism as conceived of by Locke and gang.
And under the risk of downvotes, I do think neoliberalism makes SV the SV it is today, the industry exists because of it. Whether it will keep working or not it is a different matter on its own, but that people tend to cling on and won't let go what has been working isn't really that of a surprise.
The social-democracy has wandered worldwide from its economical foundation to another set of causes: ecologism, feminism and identity politics. In the USA the democrats are holding, but in Europe most socialist parties are having a bad time.
Now Hillary (news that have been downvoted here to death) says that maybe inmigration should be curbed to avoid the raising of populism.
It reminds me of the old Norm MacDonald joke where because of abortions and the death penalty, there’s no way for him to vote for a party where nobody is killed.
Another example, the Liberals want to ban hate speech. When pressed the definition of hate speech is any speech that contradicts their own. They don't hold to the Enlightenment ideal of discussing radical views. Instead, if anyone appeals to science, hard science, that disagrees with one of their many incoherent points, that person is banned from the Academy.
Finally, take SF. This city likes to describe itself as one of the most Liberal in the country. Those same Liberals have effectively priced out the majority of middle-class Americans. You know? The one they supposedly love. They did this through zoning regulations. Buildings can only be so tall. You can have only so many families per unit. They can only exist in certain locations. All of the regulation adds up to the problems SF faces today.
In a general sense, there is also the moral regulations the modern Liberals put on us. They continue to enforce the plantation on the black population, and will for decades to come. Liberals hold blacks as perpetual children. They need welfare because they are poorly educated and oppressed by the white man. Now step back and you'll see that they are oppressed by whites: white liberals. For 60 years or more Liberal cities like Chicago, LA, New York all have done nothing to improve the lots of blacks. They are kept as subsistence levels. Those Liberal bastions could have improved housing. They could have improved education. They could have withheld resources to force a change in the individual to learn and improve. They have done nothing. Like children, they shouldn't marry. The Liberals have rigged the welfare laws at all levels to destroy the home by excluding the father. Again, the list goes on. I leave it to reader to research this on their own.
In the end the Liberal of today is the authoritarian of yesterday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WEh51z1H_o
and yes, we need to ease nuclear regulations, protect all speech, and fix regulations around housing (including the regulation of interest rates through freddie/fannie).
a key fix to everything you said about the suppression of black folks (and most of the rest of us) is a return to a progressive tax system. a few decades ago, the US taxed the 1% at up to 90%, didn't have a separate capital gains tax, had an inheritance tax that encouraged industry, and didn't have corporate tax shields (along with encouraging immigration). and thus we prospered.
The original driver of reducing rates in the US? John F. Kennedy. There's a great speech he gave before The Commonwealth Club on this very subject; audio is available online.
Classical liberalism in contrast focuses on the liberty of the individual through limiting government.
I think because we only have two major parties here, outlying groups tend to mix together more, even when they have substantial disagreements in their philosophy. As a whole, we are also less well-educated about alternative political systems, which makes the discussion more confusing for everyone involved.
It shouldn’t be a secret that the most fundamental political division of modern times is between labor and caapital, and that Silicon Valley culture is squarely on the side of capital.
I think what's happening is somewhere between the two extremes: the pie is still getting larger, but labor's slice of the pie is diminishing at such a rate that it's barely growing at all.
If they align with the Democrats on social issues, but Republicans on regulatory issues, they would seem to lean Libertarian. (Right?)