On Inequality:
What if it’s not about the startups? What if it’s the ramen?
Paul Graham wrote a pretty interesting essay about the social and political fragmentation[0] of the country. Whatever flaws it may have, it’s a worthwhile read. Jane Jacobs has an equally compelling (and not mutually-exclusive) basis for why things are as they are[1]. And Jane Jacobs could also fly Acroyoga ninja stars. Paul Graham cannot. ;-D
Paul Graham’s follow-up essay on inequality was not as great[2], and it unfortunately out-shadowed his previous piece. Some have torn Inequality apart[3], and then the New York Times and Washington Post joined in, the former setting up a straw man. There’s not much of a point, heaping on that.
But it seems interesting, that people are accusing Paul Graham of being plutocratic and disconnected from reality.
If you met the Paul Graham, he may come off a bit arrogant, but he’s not a jerk. In this regard, there are plenty of successful folks who can come off nice and well-cultured, who can say all the right things, and they are total jerks. Whereas when I read the Inequality essay, I thought, this is wrong, but, I don’t know why.
The fact that Paul Graham was pretty ordinary (before YC became big) was partly why his essays were inspiring. He wrote about getting your startup to “ramen profitability” (which is to say that a startup should survive with everyone eating instant ramen) and later this got revised to rice and beans profitability because of how unhealthy the former had sounded. He also once wrote that the real reason why it’s nice having money (i.e. being rich) isn’t so that you can live in luxury or drive around in a nice car. It is not having to worry about everyday expenses, the mortgage, etc.
And what if that is it? What if that’s the underlying reason why all of this touched a nerve?
A while back, my friend TianQing posted a provocative piece on her Facebook[4]. She said that privilege is not having to worry about the unfairness in the world.
You know who else is comfortable and don’t have to worry about the state of the world these days? Startup folks circa 2015. ;-) I mean, I don’t know about you folks but I definitely remember a time when eating ramen packets to survive was really a thing, and not just a silly part of a PG essay. It’s not like he just pulled that out of his ass.
More recently, there was an incident involving another kind of ramen that really drove this home for me. Some friends and I had been at a weekend dance workshop and a big warm bowl of ramen seemed like a great idea after that mental and physical workout. Except we hadn’t counted on prices in the neighborhood having gone up significantly. Only half of us thought it was okay to spend $20 on a bowl of ramen.
It was awkward, with not as much food on the table as people. This happened down the street from a Blick Art store, to give you an idea of what kind of neighborhood it used to be. The art store is still stands on that corner. It hasn’t been pushed out yet. I got my first pack of charcoal at that Blick, and Paul Graham was right about cheap and simple. There have been few forms of expression that have given me as much joy as charcoal, newsprint and eraser. The ramen incident was embarrassing because I know my parents would’ve buggered out at the price too, and it was off the backs of their sacrifice that I am where I am. I’ve usually blown this sort of thing off as some form of survivor’s guilt, but that excuse failed me here.
We got into this journey for humble reasons: So that we don’t have to worry about surviving. So that we could take care of things once and for all.
What does it mean then, if that is what’s really disconnecting? This cheap sense of comfort, and not having to care about unfairness?
Maybe Paul doesn’t care about excessive inequality. Maybe he thinks it’s unavoidable and not worth getting stressed over. I’m not going to argue one way or the other. But it does get uncomfortably close to what TianQing had said about privilege. And there’s something else we should care about, and that’s being disconnected. It cuts right into why Paul’s essays were inspiring to begin with.
The Inequality essay talks about inequality and startups in the same breath, and that’s what tweaked me.
When I graduated from college, I didn’t care about startups — they were a pipe dream that weren’t even on my radar — but I did care about grad school. That said, a lot of us kids did have projects, stuff we were doing out of dorm rooms and apartments, and I later heard that one of those projects really got off the ground. And that reminds me of an essay Sam Altman wrote about companies versus projects, and how it’s better to think of yourself as starting projects[5]. But getting back to the point, the only thing I had on my mind after college was paying off my debts, and getting on my feet. I’ll bet that still resonates for a lot of people. I kind of resented my friends who were able to go to grad school. They just didn’t get it. I wanted to be independent, to no longer be a burden on my parents, and to build up a cash buffer before thinking of going back to school. That grad school stipend just wasn’t very much, and privilege was not having to worry about whether there is a safety net for you. Even though I went through that experience, it was easy enough to forget being trapped. It was easy enough to not recognize immediately why Inequality was wrong.
I got on my feet of course, and had a stable and suffocating waterfall-development software job for a while. There were many people who had suppressed dreams and ambitions, and at that point, Paul’s essays were liberating. But if there’s a moral to this story, it’s that comfort, privilege and intersectionality are a lot more accessible than chasing silly startup dreams.
If you’ve read Paul’s other essays, then Inequality doesn’t seem quite as bad as the critics say. You know that Paul really *does* think that everyone could chase the startup dream, and then, *bam*, happily ever after. But this is how Inequality is in danger of committing the just-world fallacy. We want to believe the world is fair, so we make up stupid shit that justifies why things are the way they are. It’s what happened with European Imperialism, with American Jim Crow laws, and with innumerable injustices on the interpersonal level. There is something about it all that ironically reminds me of the Pink Floyd song, Wish You Were Here.
What’s happening in tech screams of intersectionality. All of us nerds who were picked on growing up, we’ve been on the other side of things — on multiple levels — and well, what do you know. We’re on top right now. Or at least enough that writers at the WaPo and NYTimes thought it important enough to respond to Paul Graham. Will this state of affairs continue? We probably shouldn’t be getting ahead of ourselves. If we take 2001 to be the start of this cycle, then all the imbalances of last three years have been overblown in stark contrast to the preceding twelve. Maybe let that timescale sink in a little. Hopefully it won’t rain on anyone’s parade if in the best-case scenario, no one will pity us if we have to settle for being stable-ish.
Tech’s place in the status quo may or may not change, but it is here to stay, as is the now-loaded term “disruption.” Yesterday, Lyft and Uber happened to taxis. Tomorrow, self-driving cars will take vehicles off the road and reduce the traffic we have to endure. Taken together, these changes have the potential to transform the way we build neighborhoods, to make city life cheaper and more sustainable. But truck drivers are the number one most common job in almost all 50 states. So it may seem pointless talking about this because whoever implements this technology first will have a nontrivial competitive advantage— whether at a city, state, or country level — , and in that light, it isn’t even up to us techies whether it happens, or what becomes of those trucking jobs[6]. But as long as we’re the ones building it, we’re in danger of recreating the kinds of injustices we were once subjected to. And not because we have control over those jobs. We can do what no blue-blooded fund manager can do, which is to give legitimacy to whatever warped state of the world we find ourselves in. Because of that ramen profitability. And not out of any glory or power, but against a backdrop of mutual resentments over status and privilege.
What can we actually do about inequality? I won’t say I know. People smarter than me will have to answer. It has been thought that higher education would be the solution to upward mobility, and that thesis doesn’t seem to have broadly panned out. I’m not going to buy that there are a lot of “stupid kids” who should have majored in Computer Science instead of English. As an engineer, I’ve had some pretty smart colleagues who never graduated from college, and others who merely went to hacker school. I’ve known plenty of elite-school grads who just couldn’t cut it, or who realized that their calling wasn’t the trophy-kid future their parents had wanted for them. It seems odd to put in a final word for “spoiled rich kids” when we’re talking about inequality, but I went to one of those elite schools and became friends with some of those kids, and when I came to the Bay Area, I met many more who got a fancy engineering degree so their parents could say their kid was going to CMU, Cal or Stanford.
A higher education was supposed to mean mental grit and an ability to think critically. It’s arguable that vast swaths of the middle and upper classes lack this, and part of what’s driving inequality is their collective attempt to purchase those abilities through the higher education system. But those traits come from within. They are cultivated, not merely taught. Even for the folks who’ve made it, we haven’t developed the culture infrastructure for managing the mental professions. Being in a creative or mental profession means all-in-or-nothing today, and I think this is what’s really driving inequality and disconnection.
[0] http://paulgraham.com/re.html
[1] http://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html
[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/ineq.html
[4] The original content was in a Facebook post so I couldn’t link it here. But I got permission to repeat the thesis of the post.
