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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>Cowen goes on in his new book to explain that regular folks are doomed. The economy will only need the top 10% of us.

That's pulling the cart before the horse.

Economy is not supposed to be some natural force that people and states have to obey. It was supposed to be the result of conscious, deliberate action, by the people (and their organizations, representatives etc), to advance their means of living.

So, "economy will only need the top 10% of us" means: we are not in control of our state, we are merely slaves and resources to be used as it pleases some outside force.

Which goes contrary to the very notion of democracy (as it was developed in ancient Athens), which was all about empowering people over external forces (Gods, nature, the will of the King, fate, etc).

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Absolutely agree. Our society is whatever we want it to be.

Unfortunately, democracy is out of vogue these days. The popular trend seems to be toward seeing society in terms of "natural" economic forces inexorably leading towards a certain fate.

PS: I also take strong exception to the concept of "the top 10% of us." The top 10% among what metric? Athleticism? Leadership ability? Creativity? Courage in war? Obviously not any of these things. Our society favors some mixture of above-average intellect and ability to do boring detail work for long hours. The people in the "top 10%" would certainly never be recognized as such in the kind of society that existed just a couple of hundred years ago.

> Our society is whatever we want it to be.

Not quite. Our society is whatever we choose to make it. It is far from a foregone conclusion that what we choose will turn out to be what we want.

agreed on the detail work aspect. I know a lot of brilliant people who are floundering because they're trying to re-draw the lines/boundaries/parameters of work in order to maintain their mental vibrance, where as many many less intelligent folks are killing it in finance/law/whatever just be being able to log a large number of hours reviewing documents that i'm sure are less than earth-shattering.

Yes, but the same democracy in Athens had strict rules about voting participation, and about 35% of the population was enslaved.

Coincidentally, about 300,000 people lived in Athens at the time, while it's estimated that only 30,000 people were eligible to vote.

>Yes, but the same democracy in Athens had strict rules about voting participation, and about 35% of the population was enslaved.

Which is a historical accident, based on the norms of the era, and is beside the point.

After all, the same thing (slavery) was happening in every, or almost every, country at the time. The innovation is what they CHANGED, not what they maintained.

Plato believes Democracy is the second lowest form of government.

Plato also was a fan of eugenics and communal child-rearing.

I'm more in line with Churchill -- Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. I don't accept that a man and particularly his descendants are better humans than me because they own the rights to a mine, or invented <technology X>, or that their great-great-grandfather owned a manor somewhere while mine was farming somewhere else.

Plato also believed that truth was objective which I'm not so sure about.

Which are the highest then. Or there are only 2 of them?

Democracy in his perception is when the uneducated masses who operate based on their 'instinctual' desires run the show.

He believes Democracy is just a brief transition phase to Tyranny.

The highest is an aristocracy run by philosopher kings who rule by reason and wisdom and dedicate their lives to this and are not allowed to own property.

Which sounds great on paper and all, but in practice is more likely to be a brief transition phase to Tyrrany.

I see your point but I think Plato may have been thinking at a higher level than either one of us so there may be more we need to consider.

By "a higher level" do you mean Plato was right in the same sense that "communism is a perfectly good economic/political system, it's just that real communism has never really been tried"?

Or do you mean that Plato was possessed of a higher intelligence than puny mortals like us could hope to properly contemplate, possibly even incapable of error, and therefore we should defer to his musings without using our critical thinking to apply the benefit of 2,360 years of hindsight?

Actually I'm just trying to get Karma by sounding smart. I really just copied and pasted everything from Wikipedia. I have no idea what I'm talking about.

http://theonceandfuturecoffeeaddict.files.wordpress.com/2012...

The one named after an engineer* [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato's_five_regimes

* Just kidding.

1. Aristocracy

2. Timocracy

3. Oligarchy

4. Democracy

5. Tyranny

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