Now that I have lived for over a year near the Silicon Valley, I have a better view of the local culture which is a strange mix of lefty utopian libertarian, lefty vegan liberals and all things that might seem contradictory in general, but not here.
Atlas Shrugged, in the liberal California
I want to address here what I’ve learned in these months, so that European newcomers can sharpen their learning curve !
Atlas Shrugged
Atlas Shrugged has a tremendous influence on the psyche here. For people who are unaware of what this book is about, you can check the Atlantic’s Atlas Shrugged book club, which will give you an indication of why this book is considered the second bible here (it is a long book, and the notion of providence is re-enacted, even though it is not called divine providence here.)
It turns out that there’s quite a few Rando-libertarian, such as Travis Kalanick, CEO of Uber (read Travis Shrugged: The creepy, dangerous ideology behind Silicon Valley’s Cult of Disruption), or just plain libertarian such as Paypal Peter Thiel (with his crazy idea of Thiel fellows, where he gives money to young innocent to dodge college and start their business instead. I’ve had the chance to meet some of them… and that’s really creepy) or Paul Graham (founder of the famous Y-combinator. His book “Hackers and Painters” is interesting in many ways, but describes a world that I’m not part of.). Sometimes, you have people like Elon Musk, for whom I have very mixed feeling but I still admire is efforts in making engineers dreaming of a better future again.I, Pencil
Leonard E. Read’s “I, Pencil” (French translation here) is an interesting text for another trend at work here, which is the belief in the Free-Market. The story in this text is interesting, since it basically says that even for a very common tool such as a pencil, nobody can make it from scratch : humans have to collaborate/cooperate.
Yet the conclusion of the text (let the free market do its job) seems erroneous to me.I’ve found an interesting argument against the conclusion of the original story : You didn’t build that pencil.
It’s not as if the market mistakenly behaves as if she created the pencil ex nihilo. Rather, the market will tend to pay her her marginal contribution or marginal product. We can still debate whether she deserves or is entitled to her marginal product –> taxes must be marginal, too.
In a cavern deep below the Earth, Ayn Rand, Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Ann Druyan, Paul Rudd, Alan Alda, and Duran Duran meet together in the Secret Council
This story reminded of that experiment by Thomas Thwaites, where he tries to build a toaster from scratch :
Inequalities
Wage inequalities in the US :
David Simon: ‘There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show‘ :
Ultimately we abandoned that and believed in the idea of trickle-down and the idea of the market economy and the market knows best, to the point where now libertarianism in my country is actually being taken seriously as an intelligent mode of political thought. It’s astonishing to me. But it is. People are saying I don’t need anything but my own ability to earn a profit. I’m not connected to society. I don’t care how the road got built, I don’t care where the firefighter comes from, I don’t care who educates the kids other than my kids. I am me. It’s the triumph of the self. I am me, hear me roar.
—David Simon
Krugman : “Plutocrats Feeling Persecuted“
Piketty : Capitalism vs. Democracy