public defender lawyers who fought for workers rights and against items like company towns, abolitionists, etc. many good lawyers
finance people who invented life insurance, health insurance, car insurance, friendly societies. as much as we complain about insurance here in the US, life was immeasurably worse when there was none. there was no such thing as state health care or social security in those days
you would be surprised to find that there are many people in finance who never tried to make a quick buck, and are pretty altruistic. this is evidenced by the large amount of family owned banks
tech now going through what finance did in the 1980s, shift to greed and excess
The "good lawyer" is/was a major archetype in modern Western culture. See "The Devil and Daniel Webster", "To Kill a Mockingbird", "Paths of Glory", just to name a few examples.
Totally. I feel the author, we just used to nerds, but now the space is occupied by social media and false narrative that revolves around founders. No ego hurt here of course - but it is hard to imagine Woz or Stallman to ask for a mass surveillance program or ads in AI or pushed AI search in internet search. I believe this article actually went to this realm - tech for tech, having fun…but all we get is maxxxx enshitification.
Yeah, for law I imagine these "nice" beginnings were 2000 years ago at best. If they even existed at all. But all these jobs where talking to other humans is paramount will be dominated by extroverted quacks by default. Same goes for the capital raising college dropout pseudo-tech-bros. They were never nice, they just weren't so engaged in public discourse before, when billion dollar net worths still meant you actually had revenue and not just a vague trendy idea.
Not that far. Lawyers had a great deal of influence in creation of all modern nation-states, human rights, international law and maintenance of the core social contract in the modern society.
Similarly lawyers/bankers were the ones who built in trust in capital, contracts, businesses and protection of investor rights. Delaware c corp is not an outcome of bad guys.
Yes. It might be a general property of all human organizational structures, to degrade over time in terms of intent drift and erosion of public goodwill.
It offers some predictive power if so, like OBAFGKM + luminosity is enough to determine where a star is on its lifecycle. Maybe there's a similar domain that maps some human coordination structure onto a deterministic trajectory from birth to death.
If that were the case, I wouldn't be surprised to see venture capital--as an organizing principle for the tech industry--reaching a later stage of life.
Hey it's the one that Turchin managed to have not named... psychohistory. Fair enough, that's not absolutely about a one-way life-cycle (From not overly much to sometimes less than zero, or its counterpart There and back again).
For VC, go back to the Medicis? Obsession with Roman over Athenian (ie, not even Macedonian or ahem Florentinian, whom, as you know, were blessed-- by themselves-- with nonTrumpian^W (-"anti"-)papist perturbations) can only push them closer to all of extant theory. They don't get to have Germanics explain their early policy failures, eg
Update: for the record, I hold the opinion that libertarianism and liberalism (social, political but not to forget the far less trendy "fiscal") should be right next to each other in parameter space. One may be allowed to define a metric that puts a firewall, or, if you are less amused, an event-horizon _around_ them. I'd suggest "make things people want"
Sure, but Turchin's overproduction of elites doesn't suggest a birth and death cycle right?
It's a system that gets out of balance and needs to adjust over time. He calls the process that moves the system out of whack the "wealth pump". I don't think tech oligarchs are responsible for the wealth pump, they just benefit from it.
Whatever causes organizational structures to decay seems like something more general than that. Or maybe it doesn't exist at all. Or maybe it's just some Nth level effect of entropy itself. Except so far removed from simple physical measurements that it feels intellectually lazy to just label whatever is happening as "entropy" and move on.
Unknown. Fun to think about. It also makes aging a little more interesting, because it creates a framework for me to the world events I live through within--even if it's all bs in the end.
insisted stories in Astounding Science Fiction had to have. (Also disappointing because it wasn't really finished but filled in with 1980s sequels that revealed more lies behind the lies instead of following the thread through the 1000 year interregnum)
finance people who invented life insurance, health insurance, car insurance, friendly societies. as much as we complain about insurance here in the US, life was immeasurably worse when there was none. there was no such thing as state health care or social security in those days
you would be surprised to find that there are many people in finance who never tried to make a quick buck, and are pretty altruistic. this is evidenced by the large amount of family owned banks
tech now going through what finance did in the 1980s, shift to greed and excess