Yanis Varoufakis is a curious character, endlessly promoted across mainstream media including the BBC. His wife is said to be the basis of Pulp's song "Common People" about a rich girl at St. Martin's College trying to slum it. That's debatable, but her father was one of the biggest industrialists in Greece. Yanis Varoufakis went to a private school in Athens and has taught at Cambridge... Seems like he has a pretty elite background.
Well, that's basically the template for your average socialist.
They are so privileged that they argue for things that make no sense to your average commoner. It is some sort of signaling for the wealthy “intellectual” class. They gain status by pretending to care about the poor even though they'll have to pay zero cost for the implementation of their arguments.
The cynic in me thinks it's because they stand to gain even more power/privilege this way. I think those people are disgusted by the fact that filthy capitalists can gain money and thus power while largely escaping their own power/control.
So-called elite education is fucked up in a bizarre way. They all end up with an ideology that could be summarized by anything that isn't government controlled is necessarily bad. Not very surprising because the whole point is them getting this education to be “worthy” to lead. Hard to do when people can manage without your leadership.
Allegedly they are smart, but I think their actual intellectual power is below that of most engineers.
I've been saying this since before Yanis was even a Greek MP. It's just so damn ironic that capitalism and free markets ended up building these huge corporations which are essentially planned economies at nation state scale.
The problem with big tech is that it is actively sucking resources and capital out of the world.
For example, if I use Uber, a significant fraction of the fare (let's say 25%) is taken by Uber. That takes it out of the local economy. And because Uber has good tax lawyers, they pay minimal taxes in my country, so it leaves my country's economy completely.
With an old style taxi firm, the boss took a cut - but then he spent most of it in local shops, or his wife bought clothes at a local boutique and a nice haircut - keeping money going round the local economy.
Now, every time you use a cloud service, you take money out of a local economy.And people wonder why we have huge social and economic problems.
Hear me out. What if it’s not capitalism as a whole but one specific facet. Debt.
> In the liberal fantasy, spearheaded by Adam Smith, bakers, brewers and butchers laboured within markets so cut-throat that none could make more money than the bare minimum necessary to keep their small, family-owned businesses running.
In a cash only capitalism world that you can’t conspire to have more than you earn. You earn what the market earns.
But debt suspends capitalism long enough for someone to “beat” the market. And when capitalism resumes you have this perverse player operating under exceptional circumstances.
> Joseph Schumpeter … Progress he argued, is impossible in competitive markets. Growth needs monopolies to fuel it. How else can enough profit be earned to pay for expensive research and development
I know this to be false. Almost all the big tech companies consistently FAILED to bring about innovation through research. They instead had to acquire SMALLER companies and teams that had the innovation.
YouTube, Android, Instagram, WhatsApp etc…
And almost every other innovation was gained at the startup stage not the monopoly stage.
I often dislike Varoufakis' weird champagne Marxist with libertarian and nationalism bent. But he is spot on this time: American Big Tech are a vampire squid on the Western economies. They have a good product but they are tyrants. It would be good to break them up and make open fair systems. But the American top 10%, including most of Congress, put most of their savings in their stocks so it will never happen in the current system. Ever.
And now they are going all-in with AI. And I don't believe their official narrative. At all.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 29.4 ms ] threadObviously if you remove from your mind all market mechanisms, then it doesn’t look like a market anymore
The cynic in me thinks it's because they stand to gain even more power/privilege this way. I think those people are disgusted by the fact that filthy capitalists can gain money and thus power while largely escaping their own power/control.
So-called elite education is fucked up in a bizarre way. They all end up with an ideology that could be summarized by anything that isn't government controlled is necessarily bad. Not very surprising because the whole point is them getting this education to be “worthy” to lead. Hard to do when people can manage without your leadership. Allegedly they are smart, but I think their actual intellectual power is below that of most engineers.
For example, if I use Uber, a significant fraction of the fare (let's say 25%) is taken by Uber. That takes it out of the local economy. And because Uber has good tax lawyers, they pay minimal taxes in my country, so it leaves my country's economy completely.
With an old style taxi firm, the boss took a cut - but then he spent most of it in local shops, or his wife bought clothes at a local boutique and a nice haircut - keeping money going round the local economy.
Now, every time you use a cloud service, you take money out of a local economy.And people wonder why we have huge social and economic problems.
> In the liberal fantasy, spearheaded by Adam Smith, bakers, brewers and butchers laboured within markets so cut-throat that none could make more money than the bare minimum necessary to keep their small, family-owned businesses running.
In a cash only capitalism world that you can’t conspire to have more than you earn. You earn what the market earns.
But debt suspends capitalism long enough for someone to “beat” the market. And when capitalism resumes you have this perverse player operating under exceptional circumstances.
> Joseph Schumpeter … Progress he argued, is impossible in competitive markets. Growth needs monopolies to fuel it. How else can enough profit be earned to pay for expensive research and development
I know this to be false. Almost all the big tech companies consistently FAILED to bring about innovation through research. They instead had to acquire SMALLER companies and teams that had the innovation.
YouTube, Android, Instagram, WhatsApp etc…
And almost every other innovation was gained at the startup stage not the monopoly stage.
Uber, AirBnB etc..
And now they are going all-in with AI. And I don't believe their official narrative. At all.