Google and tech’s elite are living in a parallel universe – John Naughton
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
In that case, as time progressed, the people started to become aware of the inequality and the leaders and states started to see the result (in Russia and other countries) of this inequality being challenged. To protect themselves, the states and key individuals devised to funnel a portion of the benefits from the industrial revolution back down to the wider populace, to offer comfort through more spare time, better health, better living conditions.
The industrial machine operated at only slightly below the potential level of efficiency it promised, but now the machine was able to sustain itself and ensure it's future.
Where we are today is that the digital revolution has created machines that achieve an even greater efficiency. The "sharing economy" it has brought about is little more than an externalisation of corporation costs of production, allowing those corporations to reap greater benefits with very little cost. The inequality technology has brought about is staggering to behold.
What I believe has yet to be achieved is a balancing of the externalisation of costs with the need to build a system that is able to sustain itself. For the current system to survive, those who have need to find ways to increase the comfort and conditions of those who have not.
Remember that inequality was huge way before the industrial revolution. You know how feudalism worked, right? A few dozen filthy-rich noble families + 99% of population in abject misery, was the rule for most of Europe in the best part of the previous couple millennia. Situation improved with the ascension of bourgeoisie, but even that was limited to a small fraction of population that lived in big cities, in a time where almost everyone still worked the fields. The industrial revolution replaced old methods of economic exploitation with new methods, no big change for better or worse. Competition forced the bulk of industrial efficiency to benefit consumers; suddenly a good overcoat was not a luxury for the rich, etc. which started a virtuous economic cycle - and also meant that profit margins were NOT so fantastically big for capital owners. It's sure big fortunes were made by the barons of early factories and railroads etc., but the elites were already making tons of money before any new tech.
"people started to become aware of the inequality and the leaders and states started to see the result (in Russia and other countries) of this inequality being challenged."
People were always aware of inequality and injustice. The real change in the industrial revolution is that exploited workers were concentrated in cities, and even more, in companies / factories, so they could organize easily and fight for better working conditions, which was almost impossible for peasants living in tiny groups miles away from each other.
"What I believe has yet to be achieved is a balancing of the externalisation of costs with the need to build a system that is able to sustain itself. For the current system to survive, those who have need to find ways to increase the comfort and conditions of those who have not."
Agreed here. This balance is a never-ending struggle, any economic model is only sustainable when the bulk of society have disposal income to drive demand.
I'm going to ask for a source on this, because this smacks of hyperbole or at least ignorance. It seems that when you refer to feudalism [1], you may mean manorialism [2] and more specifically the institution of serfdom [3]. First, I am not arguing that the life of a serf was in any way ideal. They were the lowest caste of society and were afforded very little in the way of self determination, but they were not wholly without legal protections and rights, they were often paid a wage for their labour or could at the very least pay their debts directly with their labour, and it was generally in the direct interest of their lord to uphold their end of the contract by providing compensation, protection, court hearings, and facilities for processing and storing the food produced on their lands.
While it would obviously have made for an extremely poor life had one been born on land held by a cruel or careless lord I wouldn't say that living and working in a workhouse [4] or mill would have been much better, at least as a serf you would have a right to live with your family in a hovel and work a portion of the land for your own benefit. 12 hour days in a dark, loud, and extremely dangerous textile mill and going home to an equally dark, loud, and stinking tenement room shared with a dozen other people sounds more like abject misery to me.
The beginnings of improvement in personal rights and freedoms began more so with Magdeburg rights [5] and town law, providing an alternative for serfs who were able or fortunate enough to exchange their tenure, buy out of it, or simply flee it for life in a town. That was as early as the 10th century. Things improved even more during the Renaissance and after the Black Death which resulted in an increase in the value of labour and saw the decline of serfdom in Western Europe.
I would argue that a deterioration in living conditions for skilled labourers brought on by the industrial revolution [6] and the end of the open field system [7] resulted in a greater necessity to organize to avoid further deprivation. Also, peasant revolts were not unheard of [6] and often began in the villages that formed the centre of life on the manor estate.
The life of a serf was far from pastoral but the change in living conditions from the late Roman Empire up to the modern era has not followed a constant upward trend and even today our society is quite capable of reaching local minima.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manorialism [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workhouse [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdeburg_rights [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_field_system [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_peasant_revolts
Your armchair version of economic history seems a little squishy.
What of the earlier inequality? What of the landed nobility, kings and barons and knights, the historical elites which we had before the entrepreneurial ones? Were the people simply blind to the inequality at the time?
And if the result of the industrial revolution is construed as a better way to extract wealth from human beings, then why were both elites and commoners materially better off than they were as serfs?
<editorializing on>
Heaven forbid that we should respect capital investment for being able to generate wealth better and more efficiently. Surely this would be a betrayal of class solidarity and the dignity of labor.
Simply put: they weren't. The very first labor movements were formed precisely because the landless proletarians of the Industrial Revolution were actually worse off (in terms of objectively measurable things like disease rates, nutrition, sanitation, average height) than their parents and grandparents had been as peasants (mind, this is at least partially because the period just before the Industrial Revolution was, in many countries, unusually prosperous for the peasantry).
Not sure this can truly be "simply put". On the one hand there was manual labor on the farm with very simple amenities like an outhouse and well water and no ability to advance as you're literally doing the same job your ancestors have done for centuries, but work ended at sun down and people had substantial control over their daily lives.
On the other hand, in industry there was less physically demanding labor for (relatively) more money and living in conditions with heat and water, but your work day might be 14 hours, you could easily be gravely injured at work, and your apartment was shared with a dozen people.
Both seem to have pluses and minuses to me. For whatever reason, people chose to leave the farm and enter industry.
That much is fair enough, as a short-term matter then.
So let's go ahead: Which forms of redistribution would do you see? Your comment made me notice that taxes proportional to the number of ads already exist (the VAT) and doesn't help redistributing. We need to take into account the change of scale. Would it be a tax per number of available cars for car-sharing services, then a tax per node in the friend graph for social networks? Sounds insane, but is it what we're bound to implement?
[1] http://www.culturecommunication.gouv.fr/Politiques-ministeri...
Might sound silly, but to me, it's the most simple and sane thing we can do to sustain people who are put out of work by automation.
It is besides the point to know which side I am. In fact, I've just said tax complexity squashes new enterprises. I've written an article about how an entrepreneur in France loses 70% of his income in tax-and-administrative-burden [1]. So guess whether I enjoy redistribution or not?
[1] http://adrien-ragot.me/why-i-say-70-percent-tax-in-france/
The French government might as well take 90% of that entrepreneur's wealth and "re-distribute" it to the so-called "People" (I call them "Sheep") and guess what? That one entrepreneur will still be wealthier than any of them and the "People" will still mumble. In other words, NOTHING will change.
There's no issue of having rich people or not; its ok to be wealthy. Its not about punishing the rich. Its about them hoarding almost the entire pie.
There's also the aphorism about standing on the shoulder of giants (or indeed standing on tax created infrastructure.) That applies to all "pie" bakers.
Because it's not the ingredients. It's how I see them and what I do with them. You choose to cry all day long about scarcity and injustice. I choose to rejoice in the abundance and the unlimited opportunities given to me.
This is what makes me wealthy and you poor. Not the government. Not the political system. Not any form of justice or lack thereof. There is ULTIMATE justice in this world, ALWAYS. It is just as it should be.
If it matters to you I'm not poor, at least according to HMRC it's quite the contrary.
Are you the villain on a cartoon for 12-year-olds?
Today, disruption is so easy. Starting a app/website/platform involves almost no fixed costs and variable costs scale easily. We are now seeing century-old corporations being disrupted by university students. Technology has helped this situation, not hindered it.
(fixed spelling)
"These tech elites are like bankers, in the sense that they make a lot of money, and in no other sense. Also they're mostly men. And they control capital, if, uh, they own corporate shares. Plus, Moore's Law." Huh?
Welcome to The Guardian's opinion pages, where everything is a source of outrage and the shadowy "1%" are always out to get you.
It's undeniable that this has been in the news and on the lips of many partisans.
And there was some short-term increase in the aftermath of the latest recession, I suppose. That's not really controversial, though its durability has not yet been proven. (Also, I'm not sure the "especially in the US" label is necessarily deserved.)
Really, the "undeniable" label is a tendentious one: it argues, more than it describes. Its purpose is to turn a little solid evidence for a small change into what seems like an ocean of evidence for an overwhelming change. I call it deceitful.
As far as I know, if you look at the richest one percent of the population, their wealth relative to the total has been increasing, while it has been decreasing for the poorest. At least I have not seen statistics supporting the contrary, hence my choice of words. See for example [1] (unfortunately it does not say whether it is before or after taxes).
You can argue about details of the methodology (for instance the many problems of the Gini coefficient), but I think it is fair to say that the trend is there.
By the way, don't you think that "partisans" is a bit tendentious?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Dist...
It also seems like a text that is missing an ending. Very shallow text
Aren't we supposed to work smart instead of working long hours? Aren't we supposed to improve ourselves spiritually and emotionally once we have reached a plateau of physical and social security?
1) Like Cameron, most SV tech workers are utterly convinced that they are doing "good", even if that means replacing jobs with machines.
I don't necessarily have a problem with replacing jobs with machines, but we have to come up with some means of sustenance and stimulation to replace jobs for those affected (btw, these are not intractable problems: basic income could address the sustenance issue, and for the stimulation part, I believe that open source model has a lot to offer). That's urgent. Otherwise, no one is doing any good, we're just knocking middle class earners into poverty.
2) The tech "elite" (not fond of the term) are living in a parallel universe.
This one is on display any time any economic article is posted on HN. It's clear that many (most?) commentators are convinced that the economic recovery is complete and everyone is happy. This is far from the truth. As well documented by respected economists, at least in the US, most of the economic gains since the great recession have gone to the top 1% of income earners [1]. The rest of this country's inhabitants are suffering still.
By the way, to be specific about what in this article is "unfounded", it's calling tech workers in SV "elite" or "rich". Given extraordinarily high cost of living in SV, the average wage among SV workers is frankly not enough to support a middle class family at the level the middle class enjoys in the small towns and cities in middle America (I recently researched this in detail). The only reason the average tech workers has significant disposable income is that they are young and single or married with no children. Young people working professional jobs anywhere have disposable income (it's the only time in my life I had significant disposable income).
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/28/upshot/gains-from-economic...
Edit: small request for posterity: can the downvoters please indicate which part of my post you disagree with, since I have strong criticism for both the writer and for tech culture? A simple reply of "techie" or "lefty" would suffice. Thanks!
I'm not convinced! I'm an ideological accelerationist! I think that I need to push the automation process to act more quickly in order to bring about the severe contrasts between "now" and "then" that make human beings sit up, take notice, and actually make social change. I think if we let the process move too slowly, we risk winding up in a new Dark Age in which not only do we suffer severe inequality and oppression, but we rationalize and allow them through a publicly-endorsed ideology that explicitly structures society hierarchically.
I want people to get shocked by exploitation and inequality, shocked into fighting them, before they get so damned used to it that they just allow themselves to be exploited and oppressed.
A very good philosophy, that I also discussed here: http://danieltenner.com/2014/11/19/work-and-life-balance-and...
I had not read Eric Schmidt's book at that point, though.
The author continues, however:
But it also highlights the extent to which our world is bifurcating into parallel universes.
No it's not. It's evolving into a new universe. There's no reason why everyone, yes, everyone, can't be in that new universe where they work on what they're passionate about. And when we figure out how to fix our screwed up economic systems to enable that (one possible solution is the Basic Income idea), we will derive, as a species, productivity benefits that we can't even begin to comprehend right now.
At this point in time, the majority of humanity toils for subsistence. A sizeable minority work to pay for their lifestyle (aka the work-life balance level), and they are a bajillion times more productive than the subsistence workers. A tiny slice of us are now able to work with passion, on what we want to do. Like artists working on a song or a painting or a book, they do not draw a clear line between work and play. They're always working and always playing. With this they achieve a level of enjoyment of life and of productivity that the work-life balance crowd cannot touch.
Let's all work together to get everyone into this last category. It's easy to point to the fact that we're not there yet. Harder to make tangible progress towards this goal.
Do you not see how this "passion for work" argument is often employed to make employees work the maximum they can? If you apply to work at Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey, or Google, the message is clear: it is not enough that you sell your time to us, you must sell your soul as well! You have to be "passionate" about investment banking, consulting, or software engineering to get a job at these places. Consequently, young grads who are looking for jobs now have to make a genuine effort to work ungodly hours in an effort to demonstrate their "passion" to these firms. Now maybe that is because some of them are genuinely interested in their work (although how you get a "passion" for excel modelling I do not know), but it is more likely that it is something these new workers feel they must do in order to be successful. What is the outcome? Elite companies can make talented young people work insane hours without compensating them for the extra profit that they create. The notion that Eric Schmidt is saying his workers should work round the clock out of sheer concern for their fulfilment is absolutely laughable.
Btw, this form of thinking is quite uniquely American. Perhaps it springs from the puritan ideal of deriving meaning in your life from work. For the rest of the developed world (Western Europe, for example) the notion of working harder and harder because you have to be as "passionate" as everyone else sounds ridiculous. There is more to life than work. Truly. You are on earth. You can read fiction in your spare time, also hike, and perhaps volunteer to socialize feral cats for adoption.
TL;DR: Please stop with your propaganda that it is a noble thing to find this mythical level of enjoyment with working to increase shareholder value. Leisure time is cool.
However, this concept is a reality in my life, and I am observing it in people other than me as well, at work. In no cases does it involve people "working round the clock" - though sometimes it does involve people thinking about work-related topics even when they're not at work. And it also involves them thinking about non-work things while at work. From time to time, people might choose to work late, but there's no external pressure to do so.
This philosophy is best explained in a book called "The Seven-day weekend" by Ricardo Semler of Semco fame. Note the emphasis of letting life take over and blur the lines from that "direction", rather than just trying to fool people into working longer hours, which is indeed a disgusting approach to business.
PS: I'm European. This notion of work being an evil biblical curse to be avoided is just as backwards as the american-style attempts to convince people to work all the time and "show passion".
PPS: That said, thank you for highlighting a way that my arguments in this matter can be misunderstood.
It sounds lovely to say we can all be passion workers, and of course there will be people who are passionate about the above jobs, but not all of them, not by a long shot.
Of course automation will help here, to some degree, but its potential is overstated in the absence of general purpose AI.
We're a very very long way from technology solving the need of many to perform any available job to support their existence, and even if we could get there, there are many people for whom their passion is not something that can generate economic returns.
Tl:dr, I believe your comment is fanciful :)
It sounds lovely to say we can all be passion workers, and of course there will be people who are passionate about the above jobs, but not all of them, not by a long shot.
There are definitely jobs that are hard to find enjoyment in... then again, it all depends on your perspective. Even cleaning someone's shit-stained bed can be a work of passion for someone who cares about what they're doing there. Or it can be a curse, a horrid job to escape from. It all depends on your perspective. I'm not saying everyone should magically find a sense of purpose in those jobs. I'm saying that when no one needs to work one of these jobs for money (i.e. we get away from subsistence work as a major mode of operation), the only people who will do those jobs are those who want to.
And yes, automation will play a big part in reducing the more unpleasant aspects of such jobs, I'd imagine. We don't need to wait for AGI, either - the Artificial Narrow Intelligences we've built everywhere already do take care of many menial jobs - soon including driving cars, etc.
Driving cars is probably chief among these examples. I contend that we are not approaching a world where self-driving cars are going to be a super common thing in general purpose use. They make for a really impressive tech demo, and it's very cool that we've been able to solve as much of the problem space as we have, but any driver should be able to rattle off a list of dozens of odd little situations were you have to make a very fast decision that you're going to do something a little bit strange, to avoid doing something really really dumb (like, crashing, or causing a huge jam through inaction). A non-general purpose AI will always have to err on the side of caution - throwing up its hands and falling back to just avoiding any impacts and otherwise not moving - when it doesn't understand what is happening around it. My belief is that it will find itself in that situation a lot more than you might expect.
A lot of driving is just obeying some rules that are nearly almost true, which is where a dumb AI can shine, but the devil is in the details where the rules don't apply, or where the best courses of action are to temporarily disobey the rules, or where (I would argue most commonly), the rules have to be interpreted in combination with communication with other humans (which typically involves some kind of shared, but uncodified gestural or behavioural convention).
The only way these wide problem spaces can be handled by the AIs we are capable of creating (now and certainly in the near future) is to dramatically simplify them. If we rebuilt all the roads to be much more strictly defined, isolated and controlled, and replaced 100% of the human drivers with the a uniform driving AI, we could have self-driving cars next week.
I think the same principle applies to many of the manual jobs we have in society. Certainly not all, but enough that the idea that we're going to literally decimate the labour market in the next decade, seems silly to me.
Yes and this lifestyle is simply unhealthy. Life should be your top priority, not work. Even artists sometimes need a break and care about different things then art itself.
I disagree. I have some big-picture Passions and Projects. More than one, actually. There is more to be done in the fields I want to work in than I could ever do, in my entire life.
Nonetheless, sometimes I am tired of working and want to "go the fuck home" and just do something else. I have family and friends whom I care for and with whom I want to spend time. I have other hobbies and activities outside work. I have places to go, things to do, people to see outside work. I'm not balancing work against daytime television, I'm balancing it against all the other brilliant, wonderful things in my life.
I'm also balancing it against the immense willingness of employers in almost all sectors to exploit the hell out of me should I actually become that invested in my work, and against the simple fact that I have to work on what an employer wants (ultimately, what a market wants) to earn a salary, since funding cuts and such have made a life "pursuing my passions" in research academia economically nonviable for all but 2% of trained researchers.
So yeah: let me work well and with reasonable, but not passionate, enthusiasm, and then give me my salary and my benefits and let me go home. It's the only human way to run things when there are this many conflicting demands, pressures, and interests creating the situation.
To me, going on holiday, learning the guitar, writing fiction, sleeping, etc. are all also part of my work/purpose, which is multi-faceted and not contained in a single job description (not that I have one of those).
There's a saying that "sleep is when you work with your eyes closed". How many brilliant work-related answers and solutions have you come up with while sleeping or in the shower? Obvious conclusion: your ability to sleep, take showers, and do other things that "recharge" your mind is not something separate to your work, it is crucially important so that you can actually do good creative work, rather than just bashing out mediocre widget after mediocre widget. And pretty much everyone on HN does what Schmidt calls "smart creative" work.
And there definitely needs to be a two-sided trade-off between organisation and employee in this: if the person is expected to be effectively "working" (i.e. considering work-related topics in the back of their mind) at all times, then the organisation needs to recognise that and not impose ridiculous restrictions like fixed working hours and workplaces. As Ricardo Semler puts it, we've all mastered the art of checking our work email on a Saturday evening, but few of us have mastered the art of going to watch a movie on Tuesday afternoon.
Please note that no company will, imho, be able to develop such a culture without it turning into a manipulative scam unless the people who are trying to create this culture actually genuinely care about people, rather than just pretending to care. I've covered that idea in this article: http://danieltenner.com/2014/07/31/you-cant-hide-from-yourse...
I'm not really sure what you're proposing here.
I believe we're in the middle of an adjustment period that will take 15 to 25 years. At the end of this period, virtual reality will be a sufficient replacement for reality, and as affordable as a cellphone is today. When all goods (besides food) are virtual goods, all of a sudden the cost doesn't matter. The rich divide gets shattered.
You could be living in a cardboard shack, but in VR, you're living in a mansion. I know it's a crazy idea, but I just don't see wealth being associated with real materialistic goods in the future which will change everything.
VR might supplement reality just like watching TV does, but it'll be a long time before we're living our lives in VR.
When you say "at the end of the day you've still gotta log off and enjoy the real world" - why? When VR is replicating the real world, why must you log off to "enjoy" it? You could essentially do anything in VR that you can do in "reality", with way more magical powers. Who would want to go back to "boring reality" anymore?
No, you're not doing anything in "reality"
Yeah we know there is a Great Hollowing Out. We know that some lucky talented people start to rationalise their success through "doing good works must be the reason for success"
And we know that Piketty is right about capital beating out labour.
But I was hoping for some insights - some idea of what to do about it.
For that, you'd need to read Marx.
"But nobody was unemployed" sure, and if you live in a hut by the Amazon river you'll never be in need of water, but it pretty much sucks otherwise.
Don't believe the propaganda, go see for yourself.
Once that is fully understood, then we can return to ask the question: "Why hasn't this fully happened yet?" and look to history to provide the answers of the failures of the attempts, but more pertinently the techniques the West applied to avoid the scenario from playing out.
As my other comment states, the thing to do... given that everyone on here is in the top 5%, and a few in the top 1%... is to realise that it is actually up to us as those in positions of influence, power and wealth to re-engineer the system to help make it a sustainable one.
Inequality, or specifically the symptoms of inequality, are an issue that we need to address.
Edit: I just read a detailed synopsis of the book (I know it's not the same as the book). I strongly agree with his diagnosis, but not his cure. I think two things have gotten us into this mess:
(general commentary, my remarks are not aimed at parent comment)
1) Corporations (as in the legal construct) and all the legal and financial benefits they enjoy, which allows capital to accumulate at a rate much faster than it would otherwise, and (on a related note)
2) Regulations.
The more Washington tries to legislate us out of this mess, the deeper we descend into inequality. As one example: regulatory concerns are keeping the brightest, most innovative, and most honest among us out of the fintech sector, and so now I see mostly dishonest or reckless players. If there's ever a sector that needed disrupting, it's consumer banking, but the banks have erected so many regulatory barriers, that small players can't get in.
And please spare me any pleas about how banking is "serious stuff" that requires major regulations, several million dollars for regulatory compliance, and an anal probe to enter the field. I see exactly who that's keeping out, and it's not the nimble dishonest companies, who steal people's money and seem to almost thrive amid these kinds of regulations.
I have to disagree. "Financial technology" does not need to be "disrupted". It needs to be boring. Finance is supposed to be boring, because all the real action is happening elsewhere and its only job is to channel money from savers to borrowers. Consumer banking is a point-A-to-point-B delivery service with some risk attached (the risk of a loan not being repaid). It's as boringly statistical and actuarial as insurance (to which it is rightfully closely related).
I mean, frankly, the USA consumer banking sector just doesn't need more cryptography-fueled gold-standard imitations, nor more ever-so-clever statistical models for mutual funds that blow up and die when their basic assumptions are violated by that chaotic monster of chaos known as "Reality", nor more ways for a banker to write a loan he knows won't be repaid and then escape the responsibility of eating his own damn losses when the borrowers can't repay. What it needs is to finally catch up with the rest of the world and let people send money via online banking, and receive their paychecks each month via direct deposit without two weeks' delay, and to not charge so many damned ATM and debit-card fees.
I can easily think of a list of sectors that really do need disruption. And here they are:
1) Housing and energy. We can (re-)nationalize education and health-care like a sensible country, but out of Elizabeth Warren's Four Big Expenses that are beating up on the average family, that still leaves housing and energy in severe need of disruption. Passive houses, solar panels, electric cars, selling my excess energy back to the grid, micro-houses, high-quality urban housing: I, as a prospective customer, want more of all of these, and yet few to no "disrupters" are trying to provide me with that for which I might part with my money!
2) Public transit. Yes, this one would often be a public service, but I've heard good arguments in favor of the way Japanese train companies combine real-estate development arms with train arms to build whole neighborhoods around the public-transit network. Implementing that would be a double whammy. Or work on self-driving cars and buses. Or invent new ways to get through watery or mountainous terrain for transit purposes, to go where cars can't.
3) Food. The food system is appallingly wasteful and damaging while also delivering an inferior product. Why, in the largest single breadbasket nation in the entire world, is a tomato so damned expensive and yet so flavorless? Not an organic, artisanal, locally-grown tomato specially treated by elves for the most wonderfully tomato-y taste you'll ever get, just a regular tomato grown with all the pesticides and artificial fertilizers Monsanto can provide, then ripened artificially with ethylene gas and shipped in cold storage. Where are my super-techno-greenhouses and hydroponic farms that can provide fresh, tasty crops throughout the year and the continent? Where is my lab-grown meat, with an order of magnitude improvement in the energy-and-ingredient efficiency of turning plant matter into deliciousness?
4) Prosthetics and other curative medical technologies. Holy crap, it is actually difficult to conceptualize the amount of productivity lost each year to disability! A half-decent economic system should know, in the bones of its accounting procedures, that every disease left uncured is free money left on the table, productivity left unmobilized.
And so on and so forth.
Want to disrupt something? Just look around with your eyes open and find a sector that seems to run the way it does for no reason greater than historical accident. You'll find dozens of them, the world is full of stuff like that. Where there's no rational reason for the sector to be the way it is, there's little to stop you from disrupting it, using greater efficiency to deliver higher quality to the consumers and higher wages to the workers. Go for it!
Or at least make me a decent video game. Or better yet, an ebook that's comfortable for full-color textbooks and reference works, so I don't have to purchase and store tens of kilograms of heavy dead trees just to hold things I want to know.
But please don't come complaining about how "disruptive" bankers are just trying to do God's work by merging consumer banking with investment banking, until the Big Bad Government came in and regulated them all to death. Because what it looks like to me, is that too many people just want to get their VC cash for making "an app", whereas most of the big inventions and innovations we need require some form of actual, physical-and-biological engineering expertise.
You said banking didn't need to be disrupted, and then you listed some very good reasons why it needs to be disrupted.
You seem to believe that regulatory barriers are affecting some other party than they actually are. The bankers you refer to are the beneficiaries of the regulations. With a few notable exceptions, they want these regulations to keep the competition out.
And to clarify, the companies and/or people I'm thinking of here aren't "crypto", or at least not Bitcoin-related. I agree that Bitcoin remains to risky for general consumer use.
(and by the way, "mortgages" are one of Warren's four big family expenses, which is definitely a financial product)
http://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_piketty_new_thoughts_on_capi...
Tech elites have always existed in a parallel universe. Careful tending to their needs and acceptance of their peculiarities has been part of the bargain with those in power.
"Elite" and "riding a bus" are two concepts that are "living in a parallel universe." Not the same one.
Should be "zero marginal costs"...
The blame falls with the firms that use technology to cut out whole job titles from their operation.
It is upon them and primarily politicians to ensure that the gains from technology benefit all people in less time spent working and a guaranteed base level of living that is certainly well above what we have now in social security.
That's just passing the buck. It's on both parties, creator and user, to find a solution. Did you think no one would use the technology that allowed them to cut jobs?