A 1% tax is a little bit steep. But what if the tax was only .1%? Or maybe you make it a 0% tax for the first ten years, .1% tax for the next twenty years, and 1% a year after that?
If the tax was only .1%, the corporation with big pockets would have to raise their bid to millions of dollars in order to bankrupt you. And in that case, just take their bid and walk away with the millions!
It seems fair to me. If you want something protected by the long arm of the state, if you want to impose a burden of DMCA compliance across all of industry, you should have to pay some tax to pay for that service.
Instead of focusing on reducing the inequality, we need to convince the rich people that paying more tax to educate the majority of the population is a good thing for themselves in the long run.
Education spending has steadily risen over the last fifty years. Years of schooling has steadily increased.
In my experience, the impact of spending money on education is greatly exaggerated. I was a smart kid, probably 2.5+ STD above the norm in IQ, who went to public school for a while, then to private school. In public school, I learned math mostly by going through problems in the text book. At expensive private school, I learned math mostly by going through problems in the text book. Kids who were at the bottom of the bell curve at this private school still struggled, there was nothing money could buy to make them struggle less. The primary benefit of an expensive private school is that I was surrounded with other smart people, who I could have nerdy conversations with, rather than being a weirdo nerd. The second benefit is that you get to start building a network earlier. This benefit was very limited though, as we all scattered after graduation into different locations and careers. Most of that $40k is being spent on luxuries, not on stuff needed to educate, because education is inherently quite cheap. Mostly you just need to read stuff and practice, with just a bit of guidance from a mentor to check your work and keep you on the right path.
Anyone who wants to spend more money on education needs to state exactly what the money should be spent on, why they believe spending that money will have a positive ROI, and also needs an explanation of why the money we are already spending has not equalized things.
Imagine you had the freedom to design an education for your child and a group of his or her peers. Any money that you save could be spent on helping them get started with a mortgage or investing in their startup or spent on interesting travel or vacations. How much would you need to spend to max-out their learning? How would you spend it?
The first thing I would come up with is to spend it on the teachers, who are paid like shit now. I am not asserting that the current teachers deserve a much better pay. I am asserting that teacher as a profession deserve a much higher pay so that it gets the people it deserves.
From my observation, if someone is smart, they can teach themselves out of a book, with a bit of guidance to keep them on the right track. If someone simply lacks the cognitive power, there is nothing a teacher can do to make them smart. The student can improve somewhat with practice and drilling, but they still plateau at a lower point than the smart student. So we need to spend enough money that their is a guide to help students get through roadblocks, but I see no evidence that we are spending too little to provide appropriate guidance. I think one hour of personal guidance for every 10 to 20 hours of self-practice is a perfectly normal ratio. That is what we do when training new engineers, or learning a musical instrument, and there really isn't much of a way to gain more benefit by increasing the quantity of guidance.
I think that teaching could be improved somewhat, at the high-end. But it could be done by reallocating existing spending, not spending more. I do think that mentorship helps a lot, but mentorship needs to come from an experienced practitioner. So what we need is a system where a programmer can work a job for a few years, then take a mentoring job for a year, then work for a few years, etc. This would require eliminating the need for education degrees, and optimizing teacher's time for personal mentorship rather than grading tests, building lesson plans, and performing classroom management. It really would be an entirely different job than what is now considered a teacher. A "teacher" now is really just a glorified day-care worker, paying them more won't help much.
Putting up transparent bubble wrap does a great job of blurring what's behind, while letting people see if you're in your office. Raid the shipping department.
You say "in fact" but the papers you site are the farthest things from "facts" that are imaginable. They are academic models that are at the same time, grossly simplified and grossly over-complicated, that have all sorts of debatable assumptions, with the whole thing being obfuscated in academicese, thus making any sane evaluation of the logic completely impossible. Did you actually read these papers? Did you understand the models and the math? Do you agree with the models? Why? Do you agree with the assumptions behind the model? Why?
>Did you understand the models and the math? Do you agree with the models? Why?
No I didn't read them fully.
>Do you agree with the assumptions behind the model? Why?
Yes! Because they are the most cited papers on the topic of wages and immigration (I believe citations to be the best metric we got for quantifying consensus amongst experts). I also learned about them from sources I trust (e.g., The Economist, econ blogs). I'm sure we both agree immigration and wages are very complex issues and I believe we should consult the academic consensus before deviating from it. I'm not saying they're right, but we better have a good argument if we say otherwise.
>the papers you site are the farthest things from "facts" that are imaginable
Please realize you're calling me out for citing the-most-highly-cited peer-reviewed economic articles. In your other comments in this thread (which, perhaps unsurprisingly, disagree with my argument) you cite nothing, but rather present your personal views and, perhaps, a false dichotomy. Although my argument may be wrong, at least they're cited (by me and over 2000 other peer-reviewed articles, for what its worth).
EDIT: Here's the The Economist on wages and immigration written for the lay person, lest I may Euler you.
"None of these studies is decisive, but taken together they suggest that immigration, in the long run, has had only a small negative effect on the pay of America's least skilled and even that is arguable. If Congress wants to reduce wage inequality, building border walls is a bad way of going about it." http://www.economist.com/node/6771382 and here http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/10/immigrat...
The quantity of citation, within an echo-chamber, means nothing to me. Academia is in its own world, and it is very easy for academic papers to become increasingly divorced from reality, since there is no mechanism for overall accountability. This is common across many institutions throughout history, such as with scholasticism and the Catholic Church. Also, academia is highly politicized, and people cite what they believe they want to be true, and rationalize after the fact. The process of becoming an academic is now so fraught and grueling, that only people who buy into the overall methodology and way of thinking will go to grad school and join the mandarinate. So quantity of citation among the same group who all share the same biases, is not proof of anything.
I lost my respect for academic papers in college when taking a political science course. We were reading these absolutely absurd mathematical models of how bureaucracies made decisions. Having interned in various parts of government, I found the whole thing absurd. Bureaucracy is actually very interesting, there are many great books on the topic, there are many great memoirs that can aid in understanding what goes on. But we were reading none of them. I told my professor as such, and she had no defense, she said that was just the way political science was done. The entire field was completely divorced from reality, and producing nothing of actual value to someone who wanted to learn about bureaucracy. They were in their own bubble of citing and building upon each other's esoteric models that had nothing to do with how the world actually works.
Further reading since then, in reading many economic papers, then comparing what happens in the real world, in reading computer science papers, and then seeing how divorced it is from real world problems, has only reinforced my view.
Academia does produce some good stuff. But there are a lot of bubbles of useless paper-writing, and a lot of politicized research. So now I only trust output that I have verified or that has been widely replicated by people outside the bubble.
As for this paper in particular, it makes some big assumptions - that immigrant labor is an imperfect substitute, that natural resources don't matter, that increasing immigration will increase the amount of capital, etc. If I adopt the same assumptions, I am sure I could construct a mathematical model to replicate the author's results. But all those assumptions are very dubious, and yet the author spends little time justifying them. So this paper adds nothing to the debate over immigration, because it does not justify its assumptions, and it is these assumptions which are the core of the issue.
Although my argument may be wrong, at least they're cited (by me and over 2000 other peer-reviewed articles, for what its worth).
Citing useless/irrelevant articles that you have not read and verified yourself, and claiming these articles are "facts" when they are really interpretations and models that hinge on layers of debatable assumptions, is much worse than citing nothing at all. (I didn't leave citations on my comments because I'm providing interpretations for people who already share the same facts and background knowledge, if you don't share the same facts, you can ask for citations on particular statements, but I may not have time to actually hunt them down at the moment).
Here's the The Economist on wages and immigration written for the lay person, lest I may Euler you.
Umm, this is simply the Economist parroting the point of the Euler-er, the Economist is not adding value. Periodicals like the economist are written by journalists who generally have little life experience or domain expertise. They went straight to journalism out of college, and so they default to just accepting academic papers as being the authoritative word, because they do not know better.
Thank you for the well-thought-out reply. On the other hand, I don't know whom I should cite to convince you if I can't cite generally well-respected academic articles and periodicals. If you want me to make a strong, free-standing argument, I believe it would take many more words than would be warranted in small comment section of a news site.
You can cite academic articles, but only do so if you can personally vouch for them being good, rather than just relying on the echo chamber of citations. Because if I follow your link, and look at the paper, and find it is the typical esoteric nonsense, in which the key assumptions are completely hand-waved away, then I will be annoyed.
Question for Sam about the issue of high-skill immigration: Does YC have any sort of tracking of the number of engineers blocked from going to YC companies because they could not get a Visa? Could Sam write an essay with some anonymized examples of what happens when a skilled worker is prevent from working for a YC company? This kind of first-hand evidence can go a long way toward convincing other people of your point.
"Aside from the obvious and well-documented economic benefits (for high-skilled workers especially, but for immigration more generally), it’s a matter of justice—I don’t think I deserve special rights because I happened to be born here, and I think it’s unfair to discriminate on country of birth."
I'm going to leave aside the issue of high-skilled immigration for moment and talk about Sam's addendum of "immigration more generally."
Low-skilled immigrants from Africa and Latin America have not yet shown evidence of assimilating into the American mainstream. Income and educational attainment is still much lower, the communities are still segregated, etc.
So there are two possibilities:
Possibility 1) It will be just a matter of time before they assimilate, just as it took time for the Irish or Italians to assimilate.
Possibility 2) For a variety of reasons, assimilation across racial lines is much more difficult. It is even more so when there is a fluid border with Mexico, and the U.S. no longer does the same sort of cultural imperialism it did in the early 1900's in order to assimilate immigrants. Thus long term, assimilation will not occur. Long term, the U.S. will end up looking a lot like Brazil, with a white overclass, a brown helot class, and a black underclass. Technology growth will slow as it becomes low status for the educated white overclass to do real work. Political corruption will grow as voters will vote as tribal blocks, and votes are determined by buying the votes, rather than making good policies for the nation.
I don't want to get into an argument about whether 1) or 2) is more likely. But I will argue that there is at least a 5% chance that 2) is true. If 2) is true, it would fundamentally change the character of the U.S. in a very negative way.
If we slow down immigration, and 1) turns out to be right, then we can always let more immigrants in later. If we accelerate immigration, and 2) turns out to be true, it cannot be undone. Not ever. Thus even if there is a 5% chance that 2) is right, it makes sense to slow down third-world immigration, until we can prove that assimilation will occur.
You bring up good points -- but reading that quote again,
> "Aside from the obvious and well-documented economic benefits (for high-skilled workers especially, but for immigration more generally), it’s a matter of justice—I don’t think I deserve special rights because I happened to be born here, and I think it’s unfair to discriminate on country of birth."
That's not justice. Sam complains about discriminating on country of birth, but yet he's discriminating on class/merit/competency. If we have The VC's way of doing things, we're not going to increase immigration for people who really fairly deserve to be here -- the gays getting prosecuted in Uganda, the atheists fighting for life in Saudia Arabia, you're advocating getting folks here who are most likely doing well in their home places. Let me tell you, the rockstar engineers in India, China, etc. are usually from the upper classes in India, China, etc., if they don't come here, I assure you they will be able to find nice-paying jobs there and remain in the upper class tier.
I've added a sentence to make it clear I was talking about "immigration more generally"
As for your point...
Anyone who gets on a moral high horse about "discrimination" is going to end up in web of contradictions before long. Virtually every human institution is based on "discrimination", and much of that discrimination is going to be at least partially based on factors such as innate ability, geography, or genetic distance. Families and kinsmen treat family members differently than outsiders (you don't let anyone off the street into your home). Local community members discriminate against carpet baggers and tourists. Software companies discriminate against people not smart enough to write good code. "Elite" colleges are elite because they discriminate based on class, character, and aptitude. Etc. Etc.
> just as it took time for the Irish or Italians to assimilate ... For a variety of reasons, assimilation across racial lines is much more difficult
In early America, the Irish and Italians immigrants were not considered white, like the British and Germans were. They assimilated across racial lines and joined the "white race". And, indeed, many more races will in time. Incidentally, Mexicans were considered white for about 70 years until 1920.
The usage of words has shifted, but my point remains. The genetic/ethnic/racial difference between Irish and British was much, much less than that between the British and Black Africans. So my point remains that it may be much more difficult to assimilate across very large ethnic/racial differences.
Sam says "It amazes me that I can become relatively proficient on any subject I want, for free, from a $50 smartphone nearly anywhere in the world." but he also says, "I think it’s most important to fix the broken parts of the current system, but also to decide we need to spend more money on education....Spending money on education, unlike most government spending, actually has an ROI—every dollar we spend on it ought to return more dollars in the future."
So the cost of learning has become much cheaper ... but we need to spend even more money on education? Just because something is important does not mean you can spend money to improve it.
It is important to be healthy and strong. But there is literally no way I can spend more money than I do now to be substantially healthier or stronger. Once I spend enough to eat lots of meat and veggies, get some training on proper lift weighting form, get a gym membership with access to weights, etc, there is nothing else I can do.
The same goes for most forms of learning and skill improvement. Once you spend enough to pay for equipment and a few hours a week of mentorship, there is literally no way to spend more money to improve outcomes.
So my question for Sam is, what is the amount of money we need to spend to "max out" on learning? What specific things do we need to spend that money on?
Learning consists of four components:
1) book learning
2) practice
3) mentorship/coaching
4) motivation to do the above 3 things
As Sam points out, it costs very little money to grant access to an almost infinite amount of book learning. For #2, practice, you just need time. So you only need to spend enough to free someone from the need to work a job, so they have time to practice, you don't have to spend much on the school itself. Component #4, motivation, is usually a matter of peer group, role models, and rational expectations, it shouldn't need to cost money.
Component #3, mentorship, does cost money. However, the implication of "spending more on education" is usually that we should spend more money on schools and teachers. School teachers and professors, usually make very poor mentors, because they are not practitioners. In software, most people I know got much better practical mentorship on their first few years on the job, than they did in school.
So if we want to "fix education", we need to get students good mentors. That would mean replacing our teachers and professors with practitioners who maybe spend a couple years on the job, then a year teaching, then a couple years on the job, etc. Or it would mean instituting an apprenticeship system, so people could learn in a workplace environment in a safe and productive way.
If the government wants more innovation, then it should stop cutting the amount of money it spends producing it.
It seems like every week there is new post in Hacker News about how broken the grant system is. If we want to spend more money on research, we also need to fix the funding system so that the money isn't just going down a black-hole.
Target a real GDP growth rate.You build what you measure. If the government wants more growth, set a target and focus everyone on hitting it.
Need to be very careful here. Futurists of the early 20th century thought that as technological progress advanced, more people could transition to activities of arts, craft, and leisure. If you target the GDP, or some new variation of GDP that still measures material output, you will make it official government policy to keep everyone on the treadmill, to produce more and more at the expense of transitioning to a art based economy.
One way to do this would be charge a decent-sized fee on every share traded (and have the fee go to the company); another would be a graduated tax rate that goes from something like 80% for day trades down to 10% for shares held for 5 years.
I agree with this. Another way to do it would be to simply enforce a 5% transaction tax on all stock sold within a year of buying it. That said, is there really anything preventing a CEO from just ignoring the ups and downs of the market?
The issue is that most Americans don't have enough literacy (including math) ability to benefit from the best of free online education. Nor do they have the other basic skills necessary to be able to be functional adults.
The issue is that most Americans don't have high enough literacy (including math) ability to benefit from the best of free online education.
Notice your slippery phrasing. Most Americans don't have enough literacy ability to benefit from the best free online education. Well, yeah, if you define the best as the advanced stuff then that is true by definition. There is plenty of free basic education material out there too. The core of math literacy is just lots of drilling on multiplication tables and such, which does not cost money at all.
I don't see you addressing my central point. For the Americans without basic abilities, is lack of money the bottleneck? Every American already gets many, many years of quite expensive schooling trying to teach the basics. Reading and textbook material for teaching the basics is not, and need not be, expensive. So either a) schools are grossly incompetent at actually teaching or b) schools are being asked to do the impossible, and are hitting up on innate cognitive limits in the average person (or maybe a bit of both).
> For the Americans without basic abilities, is lack of money the bottleneck?
Sometimes, but not always. It also depends on your definitions. E.g. when kids aren't able to learn because they show up at school having not eaten anything for two days, is the problem that parents don't have enough money to feed their kids, or is it that schools don't have enough money to feed the kids? And this example is actually a significant issue -- right now if schools are running up against the cognitive limits of Americans, it's in large part because a huge percentage of Americans have had their cognitive limits artificially lowered by external societal dysfunction. E.g. in addition to malnutrition, look at all the kids with high lead exposure, premature birth, health problems caused by poverty and shitty parenting, etc.
If the bottleneck to learning is nutrition or lead exposure, then one should advocate directly for policies that would fix nutrition or mitigate lead exposure, rather than generically advocating for more school funding.
Recently I had a major shoulder operation. I was shocked at how little information I had about who was a good surgeon. If I didn't have a family member who worked in the complaints department of the local big hospital, I would have had no way of knowing who was considered good or bad.
My surgeon told me that I had a 90% percent chance of success, and a 1% chance of nasty complications like nerve damage. The literature on the procedure said that typical success rates were 75% and the complications rate more like 5%. Was my surgeon particular good? Did I have a better shot because I was young and healthy? Or was my surgeon suffering from the Lake Wobegon affect and overconfidence? There was no way for me to know as a patient.
That said, naive score keeping could go very awry, for very obvious reasons that others in thread have mentioned.
Here is the system I would like to see. Tell me how this could get gamed:
Surgeons should be required to give official, written, probabilities to all potential patients. So for instance, a surgeon might say that there is a 90% chance that I can play football again, a 1% chance that my arm will end up worse than before the surgery, and a .01% chance of death.
Then surgeons should simply be measured against their own predictions. When I go to a surgeon, I should have access to that data. The surgeon has no incentive to be overly conservative with the probabilities - because then I will go to a surgeon who is more skilled, can predict better outcomes, and the track record to prove it. Nor does the surgeon have an incentive to be overly optimistic, because then they will get dinged for not scoring according to their own predictions. Nor does the surgeon have an incentive to turn away high-risk patients, they just need to state the risks accurately.
The patient wins because the patient can finally have the most accurate as possible information about the risks and benefits of a surgery, and can get multiple opinions, compare them, and have good data about which surgeons are reliable in their predictions.
I ask for the doctor's official opinion/prediction about the probabilities for my own surgery. This must be the doctor's opinion because every person and every surgery is different. A doctor's job is to analyze each person's situation, and then use their experience, knowledge, and professional judgement to give the patient the doctor's best estimate of the benefits and risks of a given procedure. This is not "adding sh*t to their plate", this is formalizing a core job function of every doctor.
The patient would get the doctor's prediction track record directly from the hospital or a third party monitoring agency. That way the patient knows if the doctor is generally accurate in their predictions, or if they are consistently overconfident in their own abilities.
If a doctor was wrong once, they are wrong. If they are consistently wrong, then that shows up in their stats. Patients will no longer trust their predictions, and will seek other doctors. The doctor will have to really improve their prediction ability (a good thing) or else go out of business for lack of patients.
I don't see how this solves the problem of some doctors tackling harder/easier cases.
How do you distinguish two doctors with high prediction ability and low success rates (compared to the average for that procedure) if one is bad (and she knows it) and the other is tackling harder cases (and is actually one of the best in the field for cases with high probability of complications)?
Without input from other doctors (or simply using a lot of data where you can correlate hard procedures with other factors in the patient data) you'll never be able to distinguish the two doctors mentioned above.
"How do you distinguish two doctors with high prediction ability and low success rates (compared to the average for that procedure)"
The doctor is never compared against the "average for that procedure" for exactly the reasons you give. The doctor is only compared against that doctor's own predictions.
So as a patient in need of a surgery, you would get opinions from 3-4 different surgeons, each one would offer their personal outcome probabilities. The patient gets access to that doctor's stats that score their actual track record against their own predictions. The patient should then choose the surgeon who gives the best odds but also has a track record of hitting their predictions.
A doctor who tackles hard cases should still have a good success rate against their own predictions. Such a doctor will just lower their predictions according to the riskiness of the case. If the doctor is good, such a doctor will still get business, because the skilled doctor will still offer better odds (odds that the patient can actually trust) than can be reliably offered by a less skilled doctor.
The one weakness of my system is that it does not give any sort of global score. There is still the problem of having to find 3 to 4 good surgeons to ask for an opinion in the first place. But at least once you have gotten to that point, you can have trustworthy predictions upon which to base your decisions.
Doctors in such a system may still have an incentive to over negatively predict the tough cases, and specifically by an amount greater than their peers.
The hope would be "send this tough or impossible case to someone else" such that the doctor's success rate stats will remain high and the outcome prediction stats would be unaffected (as the "trial" would go to another doctor).
I'm all for having more information available, and when my extended family faces a serious medical concern, we seek out friends and family in medicine, asking "if you faced this situation, what doctor would you trust?" I don't know of a way to globally institutionalize that process.
But the track record for such a doctor will clearly see that they aren't tackling the difficult cases. Would a doctor want a high success rate if it comes with a reputation for only taking easy cases?
Even if the answer to the above question is Yes, the reduced number of doctors willing to tackle difficult cases will be able to charge higher fees. So at some point you would reach a market equilibrium where the desire to tackle easy cases is balanced by the desire to earn a higher income. That is, when compared to the current system the easy cases will become cheaper and the more difficult cases will become more expensive - but maybe that is an acceptable outcome if it means the system as a whole is more efficient?
It depends on the goals of the doctor. If the doctor aspires to a massive volume of fixed-rate, "easy" procedures (look at cataract surgeons benefiting from the advances in that field while insurance and Medicare reimbursement rates remained constant [and high]). I'm not knocking those docs; they provided real and tangible benefits for millions of patients with cataracts and I don't begrudge them their money. It's just super amusing to me to walk down the multi-million dollar warbird parking area and have half the owners be eye doctors.
As for aspiring to have a reputation for efficacy in difficult cases and assuming that you'll be able to charge more due to market forces? I don't see that playing out in any Western medicine economy. IMO, you can't build a functional ecosystem around the very few patients who are self-paying and willing to pay large sums for better care.
Very wealthy individuals and pro sports teams are the only customers I can see for that. The overwhelming majority of people (far in excess of 99%) are going to have two hurdles to procure your expensive services. First, they have to find and select you. Second, they have to convince their insurance provider to pay your rate, instead of the "going rate". That seems uphill, probably steeply so.
As someone who had a serious illness last year and who is not in the top 1%, I can promise you I would have crawled over broken glass if I thought it would have improved my chance of survival. I certainly would have paid a large chunk of my net worth to switch to a doctor who had a significantly better track record.
I don't understand why the medical insurance market wouldn't work. If the insurance company won't let me switch to a doctor who has a better track record, won't that insurance company get a bad reputation and lose business? U.S. doctors have a better reputation than Mexican doctors and in this case most people pay for insurance which covers treatment by the more reputable doctor - I imagine the same effect would apply between doctors within the US if there were a objective track record which identifies the better-performing doctors.
Even if this does work, all it validates (measures) is the accuracy of guessing outcome. It does not (as mentioned via reference to global score) actually measure what the best odds for likelyhood are.
The system also does not account for new entry in to the surgical field, nor doctors changing in skill and accuracy over time (the data doesn't have aging parameters).
You can distinguish the two doctors very easily: for any given patient, the doctor with low success rates will give that patient lower odds than the doctor who only tackles harder cases.
"College is about protecting the young from an unforgiving society...Traditionally, college was to protect young men from the horrors that society inflicts upon men of low status,... It protects the students, and it protects the market from their wage depression, and it protects society from a deluge of unemployed people..."
I am not aware of any evidence that these motivations were the conscious intent behind the creation of the post-World War II university complex (except to the extent that avoiding mass post-war unemployment was a motivation for the GI bill in particular). Nor does it seem like it was the subconscious or institutional intent either. Do you have any evidence for these statements?
In my understanding, the post-war college system was created because the nation's leadership believed in the goals of training people for the workforce and the Utopian goal of educating every person as a philosophe. The people in charge of the system at the time were academics themselves, who were true believers. As the university industry grew, there is a big incentive to cater to the whims of the students in order to attract students, so universities have made themselves a very pleasant and sheltered playground for 18-22 year olds.
The subconcious, adaptive motivation for the creation of the university system, is that the idea of a university education is a self-replicating adaptive fiction. Whether or not the education is useful, the more people who have the education, the more people who are indoctrinated to believe that said education is useful, so the more the belief replicates.
If I was pg, unless I was writing essays based directly on the YCombinator experience, I would write under a pseudonym. Once you achieve a certain level of fame, it is simply too dangerous and aggravating to write honestly under your own name. This has only gotten worse in the past few years with the rise of angry twitter and tumblr mobs. The world is full of people who wish to punch upwards and tear someone down of higher status. And then on the flip side you have too many groupies who will agree with you just because you are successful. Of course, maybe he already is writing and submitting essays under a pseudonym, we may never know ...
There's too much of a benefit to his brand to not write. YC gets first pick of so many startups because people say, "I want to get advice from THIS guy"
As for the overall issue of "Talking your position" - everyone does it. Left and Right leaning economists get different research conclusions. You just have to be aware that it exists. And despite this, the advice from PG, Peter Theil, Marc A and others is different, despite them all being long startups.
Your second point needs more emphasis. Everybody has their own story, and it's always biased by their personal experiences and worldview. There's no such thing as a "fair and balanced" perspective, there are just people who pretend their perspective is balanced and end up introducing another sort of bias into it.
The article and some of the comments here seem to suggest that there's something more "authentic" about a piece when it comes from a subversive, low-power position. Why? What makes the perspective of someone in a position without power more authentic than the perspective of someone with it, other than the fact that it will probably resonate more with the personal experiences of many more people since power tends to be a pyramid with a much wider base than top?
The real answer is to carefully consider where the perspective of whomever is speaking is coming from, and identify how closely it aligns with where you are and want to go. The perspective of a billionaire on how hard it is to make ends meet, if you're living at the poverty threshold? Probably not that relevant. The perspective of a billionaire who started out poor on how he got to where he is? Probably pretty relevant.
>What makes the perspective of someone in a position without power more authentic than the perspective of someone with it...
General conservatism. People who have something to lose, be it money, fame, power, prestige, credibility, etc., will always weigh the benefits of their actions against the cost of losing what they have.
And they should. People with power are taken more seriously. Guys like Buffet can move the markets just by talking. But I think sometimes people don't WANT that kind of power/leverage when they write; maybe they just want to explore ideas, write for entertainment, or something else without all the hassle and baggage that status brings.
>What makes the perspective of someone in a position without power more authentic than the perspective of someone with it...
Well someone not in a position of authority or power doesn't have to worry about losing said authority. If you tell too many uncomfortable truths or offend the wrong people, you may in certain instances loose some of your power. So it makes sense that the likely hood of getting an "authentic" story seems to get less and less as the person telling it rises in stature, power, authority.
Someone who's in a position of authority or power doesn't have to worry about gaining said authority, while someone who's not very often does. Rationally, the two situations are equivalent. (Psychologically they aren't; there's a cognitive bias that causes people to weight losses higher than gains, but there's also a cognitive bias in others that makes it easier to avoid losses than enact gains, so they roughly cancel out.) You can't draw significant conclusions either way along this dimension: the willingness to sacrifice authenticity for power is a mark of the security<=>insecurity axis, not power<=>powerlessness.
I don't know that those two axes are orthogonal. It seems like there is an asymmetry between gaining power and losing power. I think we can agree empirically (if not definitionaly) that there are fewer people with power / status. There are a lot of things besides not offending those others that keeps people in a position without power. If you know that these other factors are keeping you low status, then you have less incentive to pretend to be something you are not. But a single offensive comment can sometimes dislodge someone with power.
Actually, left and right leaning economists are surprisingly unbiased. See the essay (based on data) "Economists Are Almost Inhumanly Impartial". It's as if the scientific method works.
It is very hard to not introduce bias into social sciences. This is also why psychology and software engineering studies are hard to trust. It is more pervasive in economics when there are rewards to be linked to a given worldview. (You can make a lot of side money as an expert witness if you have written a lot of papers either solidly pro or against anti-trust legislation)
The source you're linking is mentioned in the first 3 words of the article he linked. The MotherJones.com article is a direct response to the article you linked.
I'm not sure what the units are there in that graph, but when trying to scale the vertical and horizontal of the graph to have 1 unit vs 1 unit, it seems to have a larger looking slope to me. Still smaller than one though.
The X and Y axes do not have the same units, so scaling them this way is meaningless. The key point is that while there line has slope, the spread of the data is much larger.
I.e., the ideology of the study's author gives you very little information about the numerical values in the study.
Well it depends on what pg wants doesn't it? If his priority with his writing is to continue leveraging the YC brand then he should certainly write under his own name. And there are dozens of other reasons to write under his own name such as being able to speak to people about all his work in person very easily.
On the other hand, depending on how PG views his writing oeuvre, if he wants to be taken seriously as an essayist outside of the domain of business advice I could see it being in his best interest to write under a pseudonym. For better or worse most people are going to see him as Paul Graham startup investor/former startup founder. If he wants people to take writer Paul Graham very seriously, like Paris Review seriously, it would probably help to divorce himself as an author from his business background.
You're then putting him in a situation that nobody has any reason to listen to him. Okay, sure, maybe over the years he can build another brand around his pseudonym as a domain exert in something else, but that struggle is potentially just as difficult.
While I see what you are saying, it strikes me as advice that would make him fade into, if not irrelevance, some kind of "Sages of Yesteryear" status. It's safe, but you don't generate good ideas by being safe. (I don't have anything against pseudonyms but they are hard to keep secret.)
Part of the point of writing essays is to explore ideas honestly, and honesty is often not safe. I hope he stays honest.
necessity as they say is the mother of invention. money is the mother of indolence and sloth. hence the essay. The issue about mixed motives is also tied in their somewhere, too. honesty comes more freely to those with nothing to lose. whilst those with everything to lose, have averything to gain from shading the truth. {etc}
If the tax was only .1%, the corporation with big pockets would have to raise their bid to millions of dollars in order to bankrupt you. And in that case, just take their bid and walk away with the millions!
It seems fair to me. If you want something protected by the long arm of the state, if you want to impose a burden of DMCA compliance across all of industry, you should have to pay some tax to pay for that service.