I'm pretty sure that if the anti-trust litigation in 2001 hadn't battered microsoft then tech wages would not be as high today. Competition among employers is good for wages, and the fewer and bigger the employers, the less the competition.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/02/google-apple-cl...
In fact, most everyone I knew that worked for Microsoft in the 1990s became a millionaire.
Also, keep in mind a story of Bell Labs - the innovation power house hugely responsible for tens of Nobel Prize winning inventions such as transistor and solar cells. You need an insanely rich and powerful parent company to fund something like this (only Alphabet is kind pf doing it these days)
Funding and profit motive are different things and optimize for different results.
Or the US government, which funds the overwhelming majority of basic research in the world.
The real effective argument/consideration IMO is the question of whether the technology MARKET is more prosperous /because/ of the centralization, and therefore leading to higher demand/wages, or vice versa.
Just look at the recent IPOs. We had one go sour and it highlights how rare those occurrences are.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
In reality, many many people work at jobs that they don't believe in. I personally haven't been able to hack it - I'm too stubborn to keep my mouth shut at appropriate times.
But ultimately, people can and will vote against "their own self interest". I vote for and fund environmental parties, despite that meaning I will personally lose out in a lot of ways, because it's the right thing to do.
That's part of what being a mature adult is. Recognizing that it's not all about your personal status and/or livelihood.
Personally none of that stuff mattered once I earned more than like, twice minimum wage. Nowhere near $200K.
Maybe that's a US thing, since you guys have so much tied up in work (health insurance etc).
I just think about having enough money to get by and help people around me, employment fits around that, not the other way around.
Sure, people who are actually earning biscuits as a wage are basically slaves. So it goes.
FWIW I don't work in adtech, I think it's bollocks and that everyone doing it should stop.
Every person has many interests. You have an interest in a salary, but you can still get a different job if necessary. You have an interest in staying out of prison that probably overrides doing what your boss says. You have an interest in your retirement savings, but you also have an interest in clean water. Nobody wants a company to poison the river in their town just to get 0.1% more of a dividend. Often people claim that others behave in this way, but it's absurd.
The peculiar mental state people seem to be in when talking politics is that they think they have an identity as a member of a class, rather than a human being that belongs to many classes at the same time.
I guess people talk about intersectionality, but I think that is a way to compartmentalize being human as a special thing special people do on special occasions.
I'm in that situation, and I don't shut up either. I can't even count the amount of times I've said something along the lines of "this is not the way to do things, I can do it anyway since you pay me for it but I think it's a bad decision".
My company basically just humors me by hearing my complaint and doesn't make any change whatsoever. I get my salary anyway.
It's not the best situation to be in, but I'm sure it's not uncommon at all...
The "catch" there is that since your vote won't actually change any election, this end up costing you nothing.
This is how economists analyze it. Not meant as a critique of you in any way.
if anything, all IT salaries need to come back to earth. i assume via massive taxation from the likes of warren and sanders.
Maybe it makes sense to vote for breaking up the mothership if that means your product stays alive. See: the retardedly long list of things Google killed...
that is one interest that we can pursue but we can also have value interests that are sometimes in conflict with each other.
This definitely provides a "psychological safety net" that tends to push a lot of these people to vote for more radical leftist candidates that may be directly against their self (and future children's) interests.
Your phrasing suggests that you think someone like me who believes in the strong regulation approach is just "virtue signaling," but I would suggest that it's because I've looked back at the US in the last century and couldn't help but observe that there's a strong and consistent correlation between market regulation and the economic success of the lower-to-middle class. Income inequality dropped dramatically with the New Deal, the notional "American Dream" largely came about in the post-WWII economy -- and the move toward radical deregulation and trickle-down economics in the 1980s coincides with a sharp rise in income inequality, a concentration of wealth at the highest ends, and dramatic fraying of safety nets for the lowest ends. It is not unreasonable to look at all that and say, "Hey, maybe there was something to that whole 'market regulation' thing after all."
I'll happily vote for Elizabeth Warren and if she does break up the company I work at I'll deal with that when it happens.
The major damage big tech is doing is in my opinion dodging regulations or inventing business streams that have no regulation, moving as fast as possible to get a solid footing, and then asking the government to regulate them. Therefore, they lock the smaller guys out. Therefore, there’s little to no competition.
Is Apple trying 100 things out or are they hoarding insane amounts of cash in Ireland?
Also, if you need the best database developer, they might find their own lucrative vertical and/or disruptive passion project. It makes great sense to counter the potentially hypertensive corporate rigamarole with a fat paycheck. Similarly, if it would have convinced Elon Musk to forget about this EV thing and take a well funded engineering department at Daimler, well that might've felt like winning the hiring lottery.
Many of the largest tech companies are only large because of their cost centers. If we split up google what would likely happen is that youtube and gmail would simply die.
Or compete on a level playing field with Vimeo, Fastmail and so on. Everyone wins if Google is split up. Even Google shareholders, who will finally get some nice dividends when the ad business money isn't being diverted to prop up the rest of it.
Reminds me of a thing I read by someone that worked Broadway for at that time 40 years. He said the best thing for Broadway would be to take the NYT art critics out for a ride in the country. Because no one was making plays for the regulars or the tourists, they were making plays for the critics. Same complaints have been made about the wine industry.
You left us hanging. How will you do this?
But then again, I also don't work for a FAANG (I do work for a big corporation, and they don't need broken up, they're imploding just fine on their own), so I wouldn't be included in that statistic anyway.
- US short sellers dream: will truly and finally cripple the US and its dominant IT companies; long overdue as US is at most a medium level country
- huge rise in Chinese IT companies; left without competitors assume the Chinese giants will simply control everything and everyone; a new era of Chinese world dominance begins
As a group tech workers are highly educated in the STEM fields. We understand the science and accept the conclusions. So we know what we need to do.
That and Warren in particular is positioned as being so fantastically competent that it's very easy to see our group getting behind her.
With that said, I feel there’s some irony in this. These companies essentially have encouraged and enabled these attitudes in their workforce thinking this would make the employers look like they shared the same goals and had to good of workers in mind. Essentially they thought coöpting the workforce was possible without negative outcomes. History shows this doesn’t work, unless you are a tyrant and have absolute control and have real ways to control them outside of work.
For example Mao could have his PLA and could have his Red Guards and use them to achieve whatever policy he wanted, no matter how ill advised.
So they cherry pick whatever stories they want from history to justify their mistakes.
But I realize that her heart is in the right place and I think what she says will benefit the country.
So I’m willing to accept what might be a bad idea (breaking up tech) for the good ideas that come with it.
Technology really does have the power to change the world and the lives of the people in it profoundly. It is important to recognize that some of those changes are areas of public interest, public concern, and even public policy. The government will-- and rightly should-- demand that such changes be shaped not to cause unnecessary harm.
Obvious example: green energy, generally speaking, is less economically efficient than fossil fuels (yes, it’s getting better everyday, that’s not the point). We are probably all going to be slightly worse off economically while we transition to green energy. But that doesn’t mean the transition is not worth doing to avoid all the long lasting, externalized negative side effects of fossil fuels.
Opening line:
>Silicon Valley software engineers seem more loyal to the left wing of the Democratic Party than to their own employers.
Then proceeds to include no data that any donations are actually from software engineers.
Then the actual amounts:
>Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, who has called for breaking up Facebook, Amazon and Google, raised more than $173,000 from tech industry employees in the third quarter, according to Bloomberg News’s analysis of public data on political contributions from employees at 10 large tech companies.
$173,000? Candidates raising money is usually discussed in terms of millions raised. so 173k? how is that newsworthy? that could be 173 ppl giving 1k.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/elizabeth-warren-limits-donatio...
I would think that increasing the capital gains taxes and requiring taxes on stock appreciation regardless of they are sold would affect Silicon Valley workers who often have a large part of their competition as stocks/equity.
People don't want to use the 4th best search engine or twitter or airbnb. We all know this. These kind of things are naturally winner take all and will pop up elsewhere on the global stage if we push them down here.
Instead, apply a VAT. This would be a productive and holistic solution to a 21st century problem.
More competitive companies mean more demand for workers and higher salaries for workers.
More competition also likely means more innovation and better prices and more choices for customers.
The only people possibly losing out even slightly are the preexisting owners.
The industry’s youth and location alone are going to skew political demographics leftward no matter what.
And purely anecdotal... but I’ve noticed younger right wingers to be less enthralled by capitalism and market economics.
Right-libertarianism was an attempt to unite the libertarian parts of the left with socially liberal elements on the right against authoritarian ideologies; their main distinction are views on property rights and on whether or not de jure vs. de facto rights matter most.
As such it is often hard to place people with libertarian views firmly on a traditional left-right axis. You'll find a variety ranging from the far left seeing private property as illegitimate restrictions on liberty (Dejacque applauded Proudhon's famous "property is theft"), to right wing libertarians who see private property as fundamental to liberty (often invoking e.g. Ayn Rand, Hayek and von Mises), to people in between who want various trade-offs (e.g. mostly protecting property rights but seeing a need for some level of welfare provisions)
My experience is that engineering in general tends to have a lot of socially liberal people, many of whom could probably be described as libertarian, but that the left/right position of their views is often a lot more ambiguous.
I don't think this is correct at all. What's called right libertarianism or laissez-faire capitalism emerged in the mid 20th century (e.g. Ayn Rand). It stole the term which had historically been a left term and simply cleansed it of its critique of corporate power.
Corporations are authoritarian, anti-democratic organizations that exercise a great deal of control over our economic lives. Laissez-faire capitalists saw an opportunity to use Left anti-authoritarian concepts to attack democratic state controls and regulations on corporate power. Often they will employ some mental gymnastics to redefine corporations as extensions of individual rights, hence the John Galt cult of personality stuff. This is akin to calling feudalism "liberty" because, think of the rights of kings. As such we have entered an era of unparalleled corporate power, control and concentration of wealth.
What exposes the sheer fraud of "right libertarianism" in Silicon Valley is that much of SV was created by the state and continues to be subsidized to the tune of billions annually. Look up DARPA.[1] So they're not even against state capitalism.
[1] https://unherd.com/2018/06/government-agency-made-silicon-va...
The rage induced by that event got directed at Facebook initially and has now broadened to include all the big tech companies that profit from data collection.
If Hillary had won or in a theoretical world where Obama was still president then talk of breaking up Facebook/Google would still be a niche murmur.
The book was published in 1949, and the premise which is exhaustively laid out is, if you CAN work, you should, and the government should interfere with its citizens the least amount possible.
These are reasonable principles, but two things happened.
One, the Republicans captured the Ron Paul/Tea Pary (Libertarian) movement of the early 2000s and tried to fold it into their party. Many of us left (including me), but it effectively dismantled the movement.
Second, it was less evident in the early 2000s, but, the premise of libertarianism becomes less and less valid every day. When Human Action was written, the need for physical labor was high, it was probably true that anyone who was able to work, could have found some job doing physical labor or menial jobs.
That's simply not true anymore. Physical labor is largely done by machines and SV is actively eating low skill jobs, such that the invariant of libertarinism--that there is always work-- is broken.
In this way, Libertarians (of which I once was) are "useful idiots" for the ruling class-- it's always your fault for not serving the upper classes well enough.
(anecdotal insight here): Many people at tech companies are not software engineers. I believe they are more often to the left of the general tech workers. Tech workers can be pretty left still, but I have found to tend more libertarian/a-political.
In general though, many people employed at tech companies are young, coastal (by virtue of where they work), and work in cities. All those factors tend to skew more left.
That’s a very different experience than my own, and that of my friends.
My experience: Designers tend to be pretty liberal. Product managers and other managers tend to be moderate (tend to be Biden and Buttigieg fans). Salespeople tend to be extremely conservative. Support is kind of all over the place. Engineers tend to be either diehard socialists or (and this is the minority) libertarian.
Oh and if multiple execs call a meeting and were almost tearing up over an election loss (Google), I highly doubt i'd be comfortable even mentioning my political views, so the stats probably fail to mention people lying about their political views to avoid trouble.
How often does a self-confessed sexual abuser get elected president?
And the sad thing is that comment of mine is not even slander - it’s a statement of fact, since the “Grab ‘em by the pussy” comment === admitting to being sexually abusive.
If I was a woman, and an exec, I would certainly be tearing up regardless of my political views.
It's more a case of counter-culture vs. mainstream; with the tech scene appearing Left-leaning only to the extent that the Right tries to portray their agenda as the mainstream in the media. (The Left does that too, it's just that the Right has been more successful since about the 80's when the pols roped in the Christians. Before then, Christians mostly stayed out of politics. Mostly. E.g. "liberal" becoming a "dirty word", etc.)
That's why you see e.g. Left-wing sentiment and Libertarian sentiment (as well as Furry sentiment; pro-gun sentiment; anti-gun sentiment; weird-sex sentiment; non-binary-gender sentiment; ... I could go on at length. CA is a weird place, and SF is the weirdest place in CA (except for Berkeley)) in SV. Really, it's a political and social kaleidoscope out here. If it looks Blue or Red it's the tinted filter.
In the 2004 presidential election, the San Jose districts had the highest turnout for the Libertarian candidate nationwide.
San Jose is still fairly Libertarian (the San Jose newspaper is still the most conservative in the Bay Area with a very Libertarian slant).
But the nexus of SIlicon Valley has been migrating north for a long time. SF has always been very liberal, and as the nexus of tech moves towards SF, so does it’s politics.
In recent decades the Republican party has had some quite big successes taking a fairly anti-science stance - if a politician thinks creationism should be taught in school, or that climate change is a hoax, chances are they're republican rather than democrat. Neither GW Bush nor Trump marketed themselves as intelligent men, and they were successful despite that.
I think it's fairly understandable how that would sit poorly with STEM workers - even if many of them would naturally be conservative on fiscal issues.
Tech workers as a group are younger than the population at large. Tautologically, the group excludes retirees, and as the industry has expanded over the past decades, it's growth has been fueled by hiring recent college graduates. Lower ages and higher levels of education are correlated with left-wing views in polling results.
If you controlled for age and education, I don't think you would see any ideological distinctions between tech workers and the rest of the population.
I know plenty of SV tech workers I'd call Libertarian, and even a few Trumpists, though the latter tend not to make a big show of it.
Maybe that's because of my age. But I think among the younger workers there's a much higher percentage of immigrants and I really doubt the "SV lefties" narrative holds for a majority of them (because they tend to come from pretty conservative societies and sought out the US for economic benefit).
I could, of course, be wrong in my hunches. In which case I'd love to see some sources.
Based on personal observations.
Why the activism against hate speech then?
Sorry, but the left wing is not "science based" at all when it comes to the social sciences - their attitude to social issues is very much religious in nature (see any mention of "socialism" and "wealth taxes" as perhaps the clearest and least controversial example) and "the antithesis of the enlightenment". Both sides are playing this game.
I would instead say there is a small but very active group of employees that push a left-leaning political agenda, and most of these people tend to have non-STEM backgrounds (I don’t know why this is the case, but it is what I have observed). Most of the software engineers and data scientists that I work with do not really enjoy discussing politics (at least at work) and have views that lean more libertarian. Four of the people I work with are closet conservatives, and there are some issues I would say I am conservative on as well, but no one ever really brings these topics up at work.
So maybe non-STEM folks tend to lean left because they are better educated on the issues ;)
I’m a bit tongue-in cheek here, but, couldn’t resist :)
Part of why it's surprising, I suppose, is the presumption that those making lots of money would tend to be libertarian, since libertarian principles (lower taxes, lower regulation, etc.) would yield higher profits. But I believe tech workers (myself included) make too much money. I don't work harder than, say, the in-house chef at my employer, the construction worker building our new buildings, the folks digging new subway tunnels, etc. I'm self-serving (i.e., a rational agent) in that I'll take the highest-paying job available to me, but I don't have it in me to be self-serving to the extent of saying, this state of affairs is good and we should support it long-term. It often feels like the only reason I need this much money is to keep up with people making even more money than me driving inflation in housing etc. prices, and I have no inherent interest in playing that game. (To be clear, there are reasonable arguments that I should be making as much money as I do, that my contribution to society is greater, etc. I don't think someone who holds such beliefs is a bad person - I'm just reporting on my beliefs and those of many of my peers.)
I also see that making more money is how you get leverage to influence society, so I optimize for putting money into my hands - which is unrelated to whether the direction I want to take society ends up with more money in my hands.
I also suspect a lot of tech workers, by being at profitable and highly-automated business, are more likely to believe in the feasibility of a highly-automated society that puts money in everyone's hands regardless of how hard they work (think Star Trek, or the "fully automated luxury space capitalism" meme, or whatever). We see huge profits coming from collectives without an individual profit motive (aka "the engineering department") and not as much from rugged individualism, so we're more skeptical of the necessity of right-wing market-based solutions to improve society.
I think that pay has very little to do with effort of the worker. As you mentioned, lot of people work harder and put more effort while making less money than others. IMO the argument that effort should be used as a measure for pay can easily be invalidated with this reductio ad absurdum: If you pay me for the effort I put on my work I would make more money by carrying a heavy rock back and forth all day than to work on most of the jobs available today.
As economy theory goes, labor is a commodity and, as such, subject to the law of supply and demand. That's really it, there is no other way at the moment to assign salaries. Yes you can reduce inequality with taxation. But there is an inverse correlation between taxation an economic growth, even though there are some exceptions.
My thoughts on automation are that, yes, automation displaces jobs, but it also reduce prices (not just of the final products but those of capital goods used to produce them too), so, while I don't know how a close-to fully automated society will look like I'm sure resources will still need be allocated based on demand from consumers and the economic output will be limited, hence there will still be a concept of markets and currencies. My guess is that Capitalism will be partially automated itself. We will probably need some limited redistribution for those that initially own no shares in automated companies, allowing them to live and invest in these, or to buy automation capital goods to create new automated companies.
What a crazy idea, voting against your own interest. gasp!
I know you mean it differently but people in the middle class get accused of voting against their interests and it’s said as something negative in their political choices.
And FWIW: as far as tone, this one seems more "accusatory" to me. There's a clear hypocrisy angle being teased in that headline, where the lefty takes tend to be more about exasperation on the part of the author.
(Oh, and perhaps get rid of assorted insanity such as Prop 13 in CA, so that the real estate market can become functional, and those who own lots of expensive real estate pay their fair share.)
Maybe instead of depending on the sporadic largesse of billionaires and all the awful political and economic consequences that come along with that kind of wealth concentration, we can have a functioning safety net, like the rest of the developed world.
This is some weird ideological bullshit. There is plenty of evidence that capital hurts markets and therefore society with those lacking capital ending up competitive and beneficial for society providing cheap high quality products and services, and those influenced by capital ending up monopolistic rent seeking monsters used against society to protect wealth.
This doesn't really follow at all, and is directly in contradiction with your desire to get rid of Prop 13. Property taxes are the most common wealth tax!
> get rid of assorted insanity such as Prop 13 in CA
Aren't these slightly contradictory views?
Property tax is a form of wealth tax (in that it's a tax on assets rather than income) and Prop 13 puts a cap on it.
Also, capital is not a scarce resource in the US today. For firms that would be worth investing in but don't have access to capital on reasonable terms, the reason for their lack of access is a combination of incentive problems and inefficiency on the part of e.g. VC firms, not because the capital isn't out there. It's true that a wealth tax would increase the cost of equity, but the Finance 101 strategy of "only initiate a project if the IRR of the expected cashflows is greater than the cost of equity" isn't really meaningful for startups since the future cashflows are so uncertain.
If by "those who need capital the most" you mean charities and not startups, a wealth tax would just incentivize giving more to charities and doing it sooner.
People have different interests or motivations
It's sort of like the billionaires that beg for higher taxes, yet can't quite find a way to just write the check unless their politician makes them.
Or the media stars who plead nonstop for climate change, yet live in giant houses and travel solo on jets.
These are the folks ("dozens" of companies) who colluded to cheat their own developers of est. $8 billion dollars:
https://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valle...
https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...
- - - -
FWIW, "anecdata": I worked at one of the FAANG companies for about two years, and, yeah, hell yeah, the one I worked at should be broken up IMO.
An "exploded view" form would introduce buffers and breaks in very (IMO) appropriate places while still permitting the innovation and economic growth.
Put another way, I don't think the economics of scale apply as cleanly to tech industry as they do to mass production. You want more communication rather than less, and that takes time/energy/attention.
Ask anyone who has experienced these ideas in the flesh and you’ll find someone absolutely perplexed that US voters don’t laugh these people out of office.
As the saying goes: In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.
All US voters really know about these ideas are the promises and a distorted theory and history that conveniently leaves out the horror, the reality, of these ideas. They have been implemented time and time again in various forms across continents and time. And they have laid to waste everything they touch.
You’d think people would have learned better by now. Sadly, that required an educational system rooted in fair historical exposure rather than one that pushes a single ideology at every level. This ignorance of history leads to repeating mistakes.
Here is the other fact that absolutely floors me: Nobody can name a single nation —not one— which, after adopting these policies, has elevated itself to a level even remotely resembling the success and accomplishments that can be attributed to free market capitalism.
Sure, capitalism isn’t perfect, nothing ever will be, yet it has elevated more people out of poverty, cured more disease and improved the lives of more people than anything else in recorded history.
The allure of these twisted ideas comes at the intersection of a badly educated public and the promise of solving all problems by taking from those who have more. Easy proposition.
Reality is that it never solves anything and often creates more problems. The $15/hr minimum wage “solution” is one of the best modern examples of this effects.
The other element naive supporters miss is that the politicians proposing these ideas never live the reality they want you to live. They never live it before or after they are elected. See if you can name even a single politician who has, anywhere in the world and across modern history. That should tell you something.
As a Classical Liberal/Libertarian myself I find these people to be absolutely repugnant. They are selling the masses on ideas that will cause incredible damage. I mean, Bernie himself is on video during a debate talking about creating, if I remember correctly, 40 million government jobs. We know EXACTLY how something like that would end, because it has been done in many nations at different scales. The short answer is: Not well at all.
This discussion isn't a matter of opinion, this is a matter of historical fact across nations and time. Nobody who pushes these ideologies can name a single nation on any continent in the last hundred years that has experienced good outcomes from their adoption. And by this I mean, to include raising people out of poverty and generating economic growth at a minimum.
These conversations are like the people who promote coffee enemas to cure cancer, or the flat-earth-ers. Lot's of passion and even followers, but not one of them can back up what they are saying with any semblance of a reality that approaches confirmation of their promises in any way that would not caused them to be laughed out of the room.
The fact that a society like that of the US doesn't laugh these people right out of the political sphere is of great concern. It means, at a minimum, that our educational system is severely damaged. No educated society would elevate these ideas.
Most developing nations in the world aspire to be like the United States of America, and here we have a bunch of politicians and their followers wanting the US to be like most failed nations of the world. This is a bad episode of The Twilight Zone, to say the least.
For example: Have any of those nations taken over and nationalized large businesses? Have any of those nations grown government so large that a massive percentage of the population depends on it to survive?
Those countries are as capitalist as you can get in practice. They just happen to have one or more well developed social programs that compare favorably to the US. This is commendable, BTW, and there is no reason for which the US should not actually do better than all of these nations put together on these fronts. The reason we do not is because our politicians, well, suck.
When people point at just a handful of European nations and claim them to be examples of socialism doing well, the usually point at Nordic countries and even places like Germany and the Netherlands, as you did.
This false assertion is always based on a single data point: Healthcare. Or, by extension, high taxes and healthcare and maybe education. Nothing else.
Well folks, universal healthcare does not make a country socialist. Show me where Karl Marx explained this was the goal of socialism and you might have a point.
It's even worse when you truly look a the economies in these countries and understand how it is they are able to do as they do. For example, having an oil-based economy that supports great social programs --which is like winning the lottery at a national level and using the money intelligently.
The reason the US does not have an equivalent healthcare system is because politicians, on both sides of the ideological divide, have been focusing on the wrong variable in this complex multivariate equation: Insurance.
The US does not have a health insurance problem, it has a health costs problem. Until that side of the equation is balanced the situation will not improve, whether you go to Medicare for all or do something else. This is a business, and you have to balance costs if you want to improve outcomes.
What are the cost drivers?
The first layer might be a heavy regulatory framework that makes everything more expensive. Regulation is important and necessary. Over-regulation, to the point where the cost of doing business is negatively affected, is bad for everyone. Just try to develop a medical device or drug in the US and see what happens.
I have been wanting to develop a specialized hearing aid for what is known as "Single Side Deafness" for quite some time. It's impossible without a massive amount of money and likely not a large enough market to make it worth investor's funding such an effort. The impediment isn't in technology, it's in the onerous and extremely expensive (in time and money) regulatory framework. We end-up with investors and intelligent folks devoting their money and smarts to figuring out how to get more people to click on links than devoting their time and money to solving important problems.
Why is it that Europe and others pay so much less for the same drugs and devices that are so expensive in the US. Because we develop them here and the US bares 100% of the cost of the US regulatory burden. In other words, we, in the US, pay for what it cost to do business here. The rest of the world pays for the basic COGS on these products plus some profit. The difference is massive. If the various European nations had to pay for the actual cost of developing anything sourced from US companies their medical systems would crack and crumble. The UK's NHS is and has been in trouble for some times precisely due to the cost side of the equation, something that is unsustainable [0]. In 2017 the NHS's budget represented over 30% of public spending. Something like that is not sustainable. The net result is that care goes to hell, people have to wait months for care and others who are able to end-up paying for private care (negating the entire concept of these systems being the solution to healthcare).
That's just ONE of the cost drivers in the US. Next you have to look at tort reform. For those not familiar with the term, it means lawsuits, doctors, clinics, hospitals, medical device and drug manufacturers exposure to being sued.
This is a problem in the US that permeates almost every aspect of life to varying degrees. For example, if you run a website today you can be sued any time if you don't implement ADA accessibility guidelines. I am NOT saying the ADA guidelines are a bad thing, what I am saying is that in the US we use a sledge-hammer in the form of lawsuits or the threat of lawsuits rather than a more rational and less socially costly process.
In the medical field, the cost of lawsuits is massive. Which also means insurance costs are large. Doctors, depending on specialization, have to pay for very expensive protection (insurance) against predatory attorneys looking to make a buck from any mistake they might make when treating a patient. The cost for hospitals and medical device and drug manufacturers is equally massive.
There are repercussions to this structure. A simple example is that doctors will order and perform a battery of sometimes unnecessary tests on patients simply because of the threat. Nobody wants to go to court and have to face severe career-ending penalties, so they order tons of tests to cover their behinds. Medicine ceases to be about the patient when doctors are worried about lawyers.
Yet another cost driver is the high cost of university education in the US, and, in particular, medical education. When a doctor graduates with US $300K in debt they cannot earn below a certain threshold. Their lives will soon include added costs for a house, car and eventually a growing family with their own cost structures. They will also need insurance for their home, cars, healthcare and practice. Without charging enough for their services they become enslaved to the cost of their education. As it is, most will require decades to pay off these loans.
The cost of our education is out of control precisely due to government intervention. When a government guarantees loans as they do universities charge massive amounts of money for their degrees. The result is a chain reaction of costs at every level that affect the competitiveness of our medical industry in more ways than one.
It's easy to point at a few countries in Europe and, just because they have "socialized" medicine and high taxes conclude that's utopia and the US's problems are due to evil capitalism. A more intellectually honest dive into the realities behind these issues reveals a completely different scenario, a truth where most of the failings in the US are easily attributable to failures in policy and politics and government becoming far more involved than they should.
And then there's the "life is great" assertion and yet we don't see hundreds of millions of people wanting to move into any of these nations. In fact, if they don't control immigration tightly they would crumble in short order. Interestingly enough, if the US made immigration free and open we would probably easily double our population in a very short period of time. Everyone wants to come here, including people from the countries you mentioned. I also presume from your comment you no longer live in any of those countries. If life was so great, why not? The most common answer to that question is, lack of opportunity. Everything comes at a cost.
[0] "10 charts that show why the NHS is in trouble" https://www.bbc.com/news/health-42572110
All of the major candidates have endorsed the Green New Deal, which espouses a massive economic program where the "public receives" "ownership stakes." It also calls for a WWII-level economic mobilization premised on wide-scale central planning.
That's the wrong question or perspective. What they are trying to do is cause enough damage that the only option left will be for people to depend on government support, jobs, etc. That grows government large and ultimately fundamentally changes this nation to the core.
You can't say "let's replace capitalism"...because you just can't do it that way. California is a perfect example of the kind of planned manipulation I am talking about. We are paying incredible amounts of money for our fuel. Much more than in other parts of the nation. There's an agenda here to push everything related to climate change and "green", whether it makes sense or not. So our roads are not maintained, our fuel taxes go through the roof and politicians ignore cries for help. Their objective is to force everyone onto some mythical form of public transportation that can never work in CA, but that's not going to stop them. They close entire road lanes to create space for a few bikes and create massive traffic jams in the process. So it isn't about coming right out and saying "we want to replace capitalism", it's about having that as a plan and then plotting a series of measures that will cause so much damage that, over time, that will be the result.
Let's forget the socialist label for a moment.
Here's reality: Not one of the people proposing these extreme ideas has ever lived, and much less managed, anything even remotely close to what they are proposing to do.
Let's assume for a moment that they sincerely believe --not know, but believe-- these ideas are good. People like AOC have been indoctrinated by schooling into pretty much that world view. She and the others have never actually lived in the kind of society they so enthusiastically champion.
It stands to reason that, if one is going to push for certain ideas the sensible thing to do is look at history and try to understand if these ideas, when applied, produced results at least equivalent to and ideally superior to the status quo.
Well, we have history on these ideas. Lots of it. Across multiple continents, cultures, nations and time. And there isn't a single success story anyone can float to the surface. Quite to the contrary, the common denominator is that the result of adopting these ideologies is disastrous. Poverty and misery increase. Economic development collapses. Social inequality increases. Government grows large. Populations grow dependent. And darkness takes hold.
We have people pushing for the equivalent of coffee enemas to cure cancer. It might sound interesting, but there isn't one single bit of evidence that it does as promised and lots of evidence showing it causes harm. To make things even more interesting, those pushing for coffee enemas have never had one themselves and, instead, are the beneficiaries of everything they say is bad in our current system.
As I have said many times: This isn't a matter of opinion. It's a matter of history. These people are dangerous.
Very good for investors though. They can buy the monopoly and sell all the OSS/moonshot bullshit.
