Imagine not being able to provide a reasonable argument to justify your actions, beyond of "because I'm allowed to do it".
Or, look at the way the Brexit campaign convinced half of the UK citizens to vote for Brexit with unsubstantiated claims like "350 million to the NHS" or "Millions of migrants from Turkey coming over" etc.
In general, I think both OP and you are making the same mistake: assuming that because we're citizens of once or currently very poor countries, we're doing something different than the more affluent countries, or are somehow backwards, more corrupt, etc.
Far as I can tell, rich countries are rich because they're better at this game of taking as much as they can from everyone they can anyway they can, than we are.
Just think of who is associated with "move fast and break stuff". Is it an Indian startup? A Greek startup?
McDonald's in the US, ketchup is free.
who's nickel and diming? US prices are lower across the board.
The hundred dollars you get is nothing when you destroy the environment.
Yes, this behaviour is rampant throughout Western society, it's pretty much embraced by capitalism. It's still "who cares about $x, as long as I can get my $y". It doesn't really change the argument much if $x is open source and $y is a free t-shirt, or $x is the habitat of these creatures and $y is gallons of oil.
Don't really see how postmodernism fits in with this though.
Sure, the people who have the majority of the world's wealth may be unsavory, ruthless folks, but let's not toss the baby out with the bathwater.
Capitalism is the alternative to state-controlled commerce.
If you believe in (here we go with the cringe term) liberty, then you cannot on-premise agree with an economic system that isn't capitalism.
(Whether capitalism ever works out in-practice is another argument entirely. My theory is that given any long-enough amount of time, a small group of actors will amass hugely disproportional wealth, and then start gaming/breaking the system for everyone else, as seems to be human nature.)
It gets really tiring (especially in modern tech culture) to say "I'm a capitalist" and then have people dogpile on you, asking why you want to pillage the environment and steal all the wealth, etc etc.
And then you have to explain, "I want none of that. I just don't want anyone telling you how to live your life, and to have as many opportunities as you can create for yourself."
I say all of this as someone who grew up exceedingly poor, in trailer parks eating peanut butter and crackers, with no higher education.
There are shitty people everywhere. Because some humans are murderers, does not mean all humans are murderers. Become some people are twisted, unethical capitalists, does not mean all capitalists are twisted and unethical.
At some stage of hyper-capitalism, when you hit "oligarch" levels, you've stopped representing capitalistic ideals because you have created a less-free market than when you entered.
That is exactly the behavior that capitalism incentivizes. Two facets:
1.
I'm assuming we agree that capitalism is mostly about markets and free consumer choice. So you have a set of produces competing for purchases from consumers. Consumers have finite resources to acquire information about the producers they consume from.
This means that if it takes less resources for a producer to hide a negative externality than the externality provides, that producer will be more efficient on the market and defeat other producers who don't. Thus the market rewards negative externalities and deceit.
Meanwhile, the market incentivizes no systems to produce consumer organization or better consumer information. We do see that happen sometimes with things like the USDA, Consumer Reports, etc. but all of that happens outside of and in opposition to the capitalist system.
2.
Producers don't want to compete, they just have to if one producer feels they can secure a relative advantage by competing with another. But it is almost always more effective for both producers to instead collude and cooperate against consumers. Since producers generally massively outnumber consumers, and have a lot in common culturally and structurally, it is natural for them to form anti-competitive cabals or to simply merge into larger and fewer corporations.
Capitalism produces monopolies, which history shows any time you have a "free" market without very strong trust-busting from the government.
These two points exacerbate each other. The fewer producers there are, the more they become the sole experts in their field and the better able they are to hide their negative externalities.
"Economies of scale" work in harmful directions too. Bigger companies are more efficient at scaling up the damage their negative externalities cause.
Capitalism may form a part of a functioning, efficient system, but it is always only a part. When you treat it as the whole, you get... well, climate change and a dying Earth.
It's nice that capitalism has some really efficient features. But it also has some really horrible ones.
If we're talking about functioning efficient systems, you really have to show that the bad parts of capitalism do not form an obstacle against having a functioning, efficient system.
So far in history we have only seen that the good parts of capitalism can work really well.
Just wanted to mention that this is such a US cultural idea. It's really not nearly as strong elsewhere (maybe some exceptions, I don't know everywhere in the world).
I feel like most (capitalist) people don't actively spend their existence in a driven pursuit of excessive wealth with the intention/moral imperative to fuck everyone else over to get there or stay at "the top".
Or at least I like to hope.
Also, here's the thing about "liberty": If you're not a hypocrite, you don't attempt to control other people or decide what decisions they're allowed to make (barring things that would directly harm others) whether you agree with them or not.
I do not agree with the behaviors of these hyper-capitalist, exploitative people.
But it would make me a massive hypocrite with double-standards to say "Well, actually now I think you have enough, you don't get to have any more money."
If you spend your life getting to this position (legally), it's not my right or place to take it from you.
And this philosophy of "Okay fine, but I don't necessarily condone/agree" is the difference between freedom and oppression.
I VERY FIRMLY believe nobody has the right to push their ideals on others.
This kind of thinking is how you get things like gay marriage being illegal, preventing women from having abortions, and all numbers of unsavory things.
Genuinely believing in liberty, individualism, and personal freedoms means standing by those ideals even when you don't agree with the way these freedoms are exercised by others.
Anything else is being nothing but a hypocrite.
And this here is I believe the crux of the issue. As you say absolute liberty requires absolute capitalism. And absolute capitalism by design incentives a number of negative societal behaviors. And companies forced to compete with those that perform those negative behaviors have to chose to either adopt them as well or go out of business - pushing them to adopt those behaviors.
So the conclusion is absolute liberty causes negative behavior. The idealistic view is absolute liberty is the primary virtue of society. Or in my opinion the more accurate view, is that liberty like many other essential virtues must be balanced with other factors in society.
My interpretation of you perspective is that absolute liberty is essential, anything less is hypocrisy - and the way you manage those views is by downplaying the negative impacts of what capitalism incentivises.
And note, I'm not saying capitalism is wrong (I absolutely believe is the best approach for economic efficiency) simply that it, just like liberty cannot be absolute. It must be balanced with negative impacts on society.
If you want to claim that America reached "hyper-capitalism" and stopped representing capitalistic ideals 100 years ago, then sure what you are saying makes sense . But I think most people equates capitalism with america.
Anyway, there is an old quotation attributed to Horace (about 65 BC):
Be but great, With praise or infamy—leave that to Fate; Get Place and Wealth, if possible with grace; If not, by any means get Wealth and Place;
That's an English translation from Alexander Pope, somewhere in the 1700s. Maybe he made it up.
Either way, you can't blame America.
Here I will spell it out verbatim from the article:
- By 1916, the Ford Motor Company had accumulated a capital surplus of $60 million. The price of the Model T, Ford's mainstay product, had been successively cut over the years while the wages of the workers had dramatically, and quite publicly, increased.
- The company's president and majority stockholder, Henry Ford, sought to end special dividends for shareholders in favor of massive investments in new plants that would enable Ford to dramatically increase production, and the number of people employed at his plants, while continuing to cut the costs and prices of his cars.
- The minority shareholders objected to this strategy, demanding that Ford stop reducing his prices when they could barely fill orders for cars and to continue to pay out special dividends from the capital surplus in lieu of his proposed plant investments.
- The Court was called upon to decide whether the minority shareholders could prevent Ford from operating the company for the charitable ends that he had declared.
The court ruled in favor of the minority share holders.
I view capitalism the same way I view communism -- both are bleeding-heart idealism that never works out in practice.
But hey, at least on an individual/personal level you can pick that hill to die on, however futile it may be.
Because, in their own words, that is what they're saying when discussing capitalism.
From a thread yesterday: "I owe nothing to a stranger".
No, it's not.
Capitalism is one of many models of how the state can regulate commerce through the definition of the parameters and boundaries of property rights.
I found it interesting at least :)
You can tell it's not cultural by the way Greeks abroad are not known for "gaming the system".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle_Onassis
Aye, it's common knowledge in Greece that he came across his huge fortune by being a nice guy and never stepping over any lines, of law or ethics. True fact.
/s
Generally he was thought to be trustworthy if you cut a deal -- no matter how corrupt and shady the deal was -- but absolutely willing to bribe, coerce, threaten, and completely willing ignore regulations and rules.
She said that if anyone ever questioned her she just acted confused and found a way to sneak off. I was flabbergasted. She simply (and proudly) explained: "It's the Brazilian way of life!"
I'm Irish, and there's a lot of this in our society. It was much more accepted in my parents generation, and appears to be reducing a little bit as we become a richer society.
Now, all of them were born a generation after independence, so it's definitely not just that.
However, when the government has historically not given a crap about you (as the British government did not), it leads to a disconnect from the society and institutions that increases the probability that you'll be OK with tax dodging and not have as much trust in the overall society (because historically, it didn't care about you).
So, I'd say that it's slowly changing because we're not a colony anymore, but it definitely didn't just disappear in a puff of smoke in 1921.
We're the only horrifically-bent country in northern Europe
To be fair, though I'm not a fan of the authoritarianism, without the Catholic Church neither of my grand-parents or their parents would have had an education, and indeed the church was the centre of irish social life and community for a very long time.
Like, post-independence, the Church did a lot of dodgy things, but I really don't think you can blame the one organisation which actually provided some services for Irish catholics for our issues with authority.
And it's worth pointing out that much of the remaining corruption in Irish life is at the political level, rather than the bureaucratic level. As an example, you might bribe politicians to get planning permission for a large shopping centre, but you don't have to bribe the passport office for a renewal.
Can you give me some examples of Ireland being horrifically bent?
Edit: incidentally, thank you for Kildare Street!
I wish my fellow Indians would stop this constant self flagellation and appeasement and have some goddamn pride
This is untrue. You won't find even a remotely similar tolerance for rule-breaking in Japan.
People are all the same in many ways but cultural differences are still vast.
I don’t see it as an Indian thing (or a Greece thing as someone else replied). It’s a failing of all of global humanity that anything you can get away with is “ok” to 10-49% of the world’s population (have no concrete source, but I “feel” it’s below 50%, but still a significant number). The US President got up on stage just this week and essentially answered the question “why did you pay so little taxes in 2016-2017?” with the response “because I could! Don’t like the tax laws? BLAME JOE!”, taking zero responsibility for his own actions.
They usually don't even recognize that that's what they're implying. They merely want to set themselves up as worthwhile and ask not to be pre-judged. But collectively, you get "crab mentality" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality).
On another note, I find Western, affluent self-flagellation much more pervasive and deceptive.
To the foreigners (especially Americans) - I cannot make this up. When I was in 6th standard, we had a teacher that said without flinching, or perhaps completely deluded that - 90% of NASA employees are Indians. We knew this is bullshit even when in the 90's when there was no internet.
Currently, we've got the Indian media tied up with taking pride in the fact that Kamala Harris is Indian.
It's frankly embarrassing how much undeserved pride we constantly seek.
"For many Indians, self-flagellation is a sign of their intellectual arrival". This was a line I read long ago and it desribes the situation so well.
Absolutely not true. It applies to low/high trust societies and is an cultural issue.
> have some goddamn pride
We have seen how much damage pride has brought. If you still want to see
1) people without science knowledge claiming religious rituals have scientific reasons
2) people who don't know what linguistics is claiming Sanskrit is the first language
3) people without any knowledge of medicine heralding superiority of Ayurveda
Continue with your godamn pride.
Oh come on. If we are able to mentally swap out cultures in the OP to see how ridiculous your claim is, then you are too. And we have to think you did.
Tangentially, I personally wish people would stop using the "culture" excuse for a group's bad behavior. Culture doesn't develop in a vacuum. Certain cultural practices could potentially come from really problematic sources. Changing one's culture isn't an insult to anyone if you're changing it for the better. And in this case, even if Indian culture is to prostrate before those you see as your superior, I don't think that's an element of the culture that needs preserving.
The Ferengi from Star Trek come to mind when I read this.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferengi
* https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Ferengi
The Rules of Acquisition are always a fun read:
* https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Rules_of_Acquisition
In this case Rule 3 would probably apply:
> Never spend more for an acquisition than you have to.
If you don't like it, talk to Gene Roddenberry. In ST:TOS the Klingons (IIRC) were used as a stand in for the Soviets:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon#Conception
* https://www.history.com/news/star-trek-series-episodes-vietn...
Or you could view it as the anthropomorphization of the vice of greed or stinginess/miserliness/parsimony.
Heh. You wanna guess where my ancestors come from? :)
Not to say that people won't overlay their own prejudices over what's actually there, but i see just an explicit contrast of ideas about economies.
The Klingons were originally intended to look Asiatic and resemble Mongols or Japanese samurai, with the Klingon Empire being essentially the Soviet Union In Space. And there is an uncomfortable elephant in the room that Klingons, a species mostly known for violence and bloodlust, are all (or almost all) black coded. While the implications are obviously unintentional, it's impossible not to draw parallels in the history in sci-fi and fantasy to the "swarthy, dark-skinned savage" archetype.
Speaking of which here[0] is a video on Klingons and the history of racial coding in Star Trek if anyone is interested.
The relationship between Cardassians and Bajorans is clearly a metaphor for post-war Germany, with the former being Nazis and the latter Jews. Romulans, obviously, are Space Romans.
The Borg clearly represent the dehumanizing effect of technology and collectivism, making them a perfect foil for the Federation with its techno-utopian ideals. I've heard but can't prove that the Borg were meant to be a parody of Japanese business culture. There are alien stand ins for racial prejudice from "Let That Be your Last Battlefield" and nonbinary gender persecution from "The Outcast," and the Trill species in general. In cases like these, the aliens are meant to serve as a mirror to some aspect of humanity.
And of course the Ferengi have already been discusssed here.
Although in one egregious case (TNG's "Code of Honor")[1] the "aliens" were literally just African caricatures in space. And of course TOS gives us planets with literal space Nazis, space Romans, space Cowboys, space Greek Gods, space whatever costumes they could scrounge from the Desilu lot that week.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqbSQWKV_T8
[1]https://trekmovie.com/2020/06/14/jonathan-frakes-and-denise-...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferengi#Comparisons_with_anti-...
Or you could view them as the anthropomorphization of the vice of greed or stinginess/miserliness/parsimony.
If this was Sean Parker with Napster or Zuck with early Facebook, we’d be celebrating it.
(For all those who advocate for growth hacking techniques, or annoying ads, this is exactly how scummy most such techniques / dark patterns feel to users. I don’t think that is geographically localized in any way.)
While I don't disagree with the rest of your comment, this is not accurate. Unacademy focuses on test prep and thier anthem while sappy and gung ho, doesn't really have any references to gaming the system. Crack it is in the same vein as Cracking the Coding Interview,
Cracking coding interviews would be considered “overfitting” in statistical learning parlance. You may ace the interview, but for most people the performance at coding interviews has no correlation with performance in actual work.
Imagine I'm taking Calculus 2 and I have a choice to learn the material and take the final exam "cold" or I can get the final exam a few months ahead of time and simply memorize the symbols I need to write into the exam booklet. The latter is self-evidently gaming the system.
When primary school teachers teach directly towards the assessment exam, they are only incidentally teaching the subject and are primarily (IMO) gaming the system as well.
> I have a choice to learn the material and take the final exam "cold"
What does cold means? Learning calculus without solving exercises? Or without solving variety of exercises? Intentionally ignoring last years tests and not trying them?
If your learning materials match what the test is supposed to test, you will solve a lot of exercises while learning from them. And the test itself would contain combinations and variations from these.
A test is a proxy for actual performance working on some useful task. The nature of useful work is usually that it can't be represented by two hours of multiple choice questions, whiteboarding, or anecdotes about "a time you disagreed with someone"; therefore, most tests will differ from the work. Learning to pass the test is easier than learning to do the work, but if you do that the test ceases to measure your work performance.
If it is more prevalent than in other societies then you can definitely call it a phenomenon.
edit: the UK is the only culture I'm really familiar with
I suspect it's a common theme of countries that managed to keep an identity while under a long foreign domination. when the state is the enemy for generations, the ethics and norm about law and legality become a lot more flexible.
> Henrich anticipates a quibble about what he calls “the Italian enigma”: Why, if Italy has been Catholic for so long, did northern Italy become a prosperous banking center, while southern Italy stayed poor and was plagued by mafiosi? The answer, Henrich declares, is that southern Italy was never conquered by the Church-backed Carolingian empire. Sicily remained under Muslim rule and much of the rest of the south was controlled by the Orthodox Church until the papal hierarchy finally assimilated them both in the 11th century. This is why, according to Henrich, cousin marriage in the boot of Italy and Sicily is 10 times higher than in the north, and in most provinces in Sicily, hardly anyone donates blood (a measure of willingness to help strangers), while some northern provinces receive 105 donations of 16-ounce bags per 1,000 people per year.
* https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/joseph-...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emirate_of_Sicily
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest_of_southern_It...
I didn't see lots of Italians creating a PR just to get a T-Shirt
India dwarfs the entirety of Europe, never mind Italy, by population size.
More seriously, I have heard on a TV programme, and I have NO DATA for this, that britain put more resources and/or cash into the US than it ever got out (edit: until the US became independent, which is about the 300 years the poster mentioned). Does anyone know reliable sources that can verify, refute or somehow qualify that statement?
Edit: why is the parent post flagged and dead? Flagging should be used for proper offence, which I did not take and led me to an interesting question.
That type of spam, especially on GitHub (so by folks trying to get into IT) really only reinforces the stereotype that 95% of Indian IT students can't code [3] [4].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24645000
[1] https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/41687/what-is-b...
[3] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/ites/95-engineers-...
Hearing the stories from my parents, just getting furniture for a new apartment was already hard, since sometimes it just was not available.
This mentality now still lives on in a lot of us.
There's definitely a blurry line there. I'm not completely clear what "growth hacking" means, but I definitely think SEO crosses a line (basically hacking google's algorithm to mislead them and their customers). Even worse would be things like paying for fake traffic to drive up ad revenue. People generally understand there is a line between legitimate business and scamming people, even when greed/desperation drives them to bend the rules somewhat and rationalize it.
Also, it's considered acceptable and clever to order clothes, use them at an event, and return as "defective." Quaint concepts like morality are not even considered relevant.
The low pricing in one country doesn't translate to low pricing in another country, especially with digital goods.
Things are changing though now. Many streaming services are doing well in India as prices are appropriate and people are educated on the value of the goods.
It is also related to strong laws/enforcing of laws as well, which is also improving in my opinion.
All of which are not necessarily unique to India.
Now, you or I might say that they aren't really available for free (they're stolen/pirated), but any thoughts of that kind just don't appear in many people (amoral, not immoral).
Yes, things get fouled up from time to time but this is really the same as the old hacker ethos. It is the mindset that led to Woz building a computer from scratch, the internet being an open system and the concept of open source thriving.
> 4. Naughtiness
> Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.
> Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.
Everyone breaking a rule will say that they're doing this. They'll claim they're just bending the rules. Even when they're engaged in massive law breaking behaviour they'll claim that those laws don't really matter and that the ends justify the means.
Hacktoberfest highlights the problem with this paragraph of Graham's. Hundreds of thousand of people being "naughty", hacking the system, cause problems for other people.
The point being, you have to rise above your circumstances. Just because everyone you grew up with is doing something gravely immoral doesn't make it correct. No culture should exude pathological behavior as a trait.
"Part of the culture" is bad... And "correlated with the culture" is good. But "exude pathological behavior" is where you end.
Have you figured out yet that language policing is just tiptoeing around the things you're not supposed to notice?
* "Gaming the system" to get your desired outcome is widely accepted in Indian society. Especially if it doesn't involve breaking any laws (not ethics). Even in many cases Gaming the system by breaking the law is considered OK as long as one doesn't get caught doing it. (In fact this might be the only way to come up in politics in India, but that's another debate.) Once they are caught the general attitude is "they had it coming".
Consider this highflying Indian start up, Unacademy[1][2]. Here is their anthem [3], "Let's crack it". This "crack it" is basically about "Gaming it" and succeed at it any how.
* Majority of Indians have a lot of attraction towards free. I have seen even people from millionaire families, spend 10-15 minutes of their time to get something free that is of $1 or $2 in value. The attitude is like, am I doing anything else productive here? If not I might as well do this and earn Rs. 100. In fact this attitude is cultivated from childhood in certain business class families. Don't let go of any opportunity of earning a profit, however small it might be.
Here we are talking about student population which is generally low on cash anyway.
So if you are any company offering something free to Indians, expect them to come in droves, and milk you as much as possible. Here I think Digital Ocean doesn't mind being well known in Indian students. Many of these Indian Students are going to make purchasing decisions on servers in a few years to come. Unfortunately, it's the OSS community suffering because of it now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unacademy
[2] https://unacademy.com/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvIfiblHz1I