For the Win
, Cory Doctorow’s new novel, is out today (in bookstores and also as a free download). And it’s about gaming, and its consequences.
Now, you know I am biased, because not only is Cory a friend, but I even supplied a blurb for the book’s back cover. I also reviewed the manuscript for him and supplied gaming advice. That said, this is a book that people into MMOs and virtual worlds should read.
Why? Because it isn’t about what happens inside the worlds, it’s about what repercussions they have outside them. The story is sort of a large-scale version of his short story “Anda’s Game” (which was collected in Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present and also published on Salon.com), in which guilds are organized on multiple sides of the gold farming wars: a guild to kill gold farmers to protect the game, a guild to defend them so that they can earn their subsistence wage…
In For The Win all this is taken to a larger scale. Essentially, it extrapolates gold farming into a multinational corporate phenomenon, and looks at what this means for the lives of the people on the front lines — kids, usually, living in India or China, looking to make money but finding that the act of grinding gold “for the man” becomes all too literal in sweatshops. And the upshot is that they organize. As in unions.
As in unions modeled explicitly on the Wobblies, in fact. The novel wears its politics on its sleeve, certainly, and that may be a turnoff for those who don’t see unions as a natural stage in the evolution from free-for-all robber-baron economics to a more mature model. That said, the book comes down pretty hard on all forms of totalitarianism
The in-game stuff is dead-on. But as I said, the book is more about the ripples the games cause, than about the games themselves, because that is where the real psychological action is. It is more about the relationship between a gamer kid in San Diego and his parents who don’t understand his hobby, than it is about the stuff he does inside the game (which does include a pretty awesome boss battle near the beginning). It’s about the ways in which running a guild teaches a girl who barely has any education how to organize large groups of people in real life. In the end, the book argues a point similar to Bartle’s Designing Virtual Worlds: the characters come to know themselves better because of their hobby, and it enables them to take real steps into adulthood.
73 Responses to “For The Win”
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Very interesting! Will it be available for Kindle?
The repercussions of gaming on the larger aspects of culture—particularly MMO games—has always been a subject of particular interest for me. 🙂
BTW, I have no idea on Kindle, but Cry always puts his books up for free download under a CC license. I have updated the post with a link.
Does Kindle use DRM? Cory refuses to allow his work to be bound by DRM. He discusses the issues in the introduction to the book in the PDF. But you can download an ePub version, if Kindle supports that.
Kindle supports non-DRM’d mobipocket, which you can easily convert an epub to.
I suspect I won’t bother – “Little Brother” was way more hard-left political porn than I needed, and I suspect this one won’t be any better written than that one was.
If you have an iPhone, there are instructions on the download page on how to load the epub file directly using Stanza.
I loathe Cory Doctorow *totally*.
Looks like another technocommunist manifesto.
Unions? Or in fact guilds — tribes — all collectivized, under the control of authoritarian leaders. Doing the politically-correct thing.
I’m having a hard time believing that “Little Brother” is against all totalitarianisms, because I never see it in his writings. Always and everywhere, he’s for the collectivization, the Creative Communism, and with a few big influencers like himself in charge.
Unions are a good thing — when under the rule of law, when in a context, where there are checks and balances.
By refusing to allow his work to be under DRM, he undermines the whole system for others. And that, of course, is what it is REALLY about. Not choice, but forcing technocommunism on others. Resist, resist, resist!
Don’t judge a book by its cover?
No, unions are Great.. period. No ‘context’ (as you call it) is required. I’ve worked my entire life in the 100% publicly-funded, publicly-subsidized pseudo-‘private’ US business model which is the biggest farce of so-called ‘capitalism’ I’ve ever seen. Even communism had some empirical standards, the one we’re in in north america is a complete and utter joke.
Prok, I agree with you whole heartedly in the “loath” part. I don’t know what it is about that guy, but I really dislike him. He comes off as very pretentious, and when he throws a fit and starts insulting people on BB’s comment threads, he comes off as such a prick. I suppose he’s one of those “I should meet him in real life to really judge”, but I greatly dislike his internet personality.
It’s cool that he’s offering the free download, but this sounds like a book I’ll want to buy. The omnipresent, xenophobic hatred of gold farmers masks a range of elitist design attitudes hard-coded into MMO systems that not only make farming possible, but inevitable.
Unions are corrupt power grabbers.
How the hell does a union take over their American auto company without buying the stock, while their workers somehow built their wages and benefits up to astronomical heights at the detriment of said company? Only with political allies bought and paid for over the years to manage the laws that allowed this to happen.
But you’ll get a chance to see why the American system and freedom works. Watch the elections. You won’t see this in your favored communist countries, where their “empirical standards” turned out to be for the benefit of the ruling factions setting such standards.
Which is where we’d be heading if people were actually as dumb as the upper crust for “progression” thought they were.
I knew this thread would be about politics. 🙂 I tossed off that sentence about how unions are a natural stage in an industry’s development on purpose, hoping that people would move past the ideological poles and see them in context.
Unions are wonderful things at any time when there is unregulated industry that because of economic circumstances can mistreat workers. Collective bargaining becomes the only mechanism for the other party to get a strong bargaining position. It is an accident of history that unions are identified with the left — they are about economic clout. This is the same logic as leads to thoroughly capitalist confections like consortia, industry trade bodies, etc, and in the political arena leads to parties, lobbyists, and mutual defense treaties.
As with any such structure, should the tables turn completely, then the shoe is on the other foot, and the institutions can become corrupt or overreaching.
In general, long-term sustained economic growth historically happens when both company and workers feel well-treated by their opposite number.
The scenario that Cory describes is one where all the power is in the hands of the gold farming companies and none in the hands of the individual farmers, who are wage slaves. As a thought experiment, I’d invite you to think about “what else could the gold farmers do?” considering they lack education, live in slums, and have no other viabile economic path.
But think about it AFTER you read the book, because arguing against something you haven’t read is… well.
After reading it? Eh, not likely. It’s probaby at least as reality-challenged as Little Brother was, and likely as poorly written. It’s proof of the idea that a bad book can get nominated for awards, if you lay on the left-wing propaganda thick and heavy, and happen to run an a-list blog.
Look, I don’t mind left-wing authors and their books. Heck, as with movies, there’d be practically no media to consume if I avoided them. Take Eric Flint for example. Hardcore lefty, and yet his books are well-written and enjoyable, although his politics are clear in them.
Little Brother wasn’t worth the free I paid for it, as I won’t ever get those hours I spent reading it back.
Quick reply:
Monopolies on power are bad. Unions are a solution to corporate monopoly of power. When unions themselves gain monopoly, they can (of course) be just as bad.
In all cases it’s all just people, after all, groups of prone to the same ambitions and imperfections. The balancing of forces to sustain non-monopoly is the necessity.
I like this quote Raph…did you come up with that?
I’m going to have to meditate on that notion.
Another answer to concentration of power and wealth is to dilute it. For example, the rise of the yeoman class as the ‘proto-middle-class’ reduced the concentration of wealth and forced a redistribution of power. This is not a perfect society or solution but one of the other potential evolutionary steps. Unions as formally organized means tend toward corruption because they tend toward power polarity with the members as the product in the middle. They can spawn parasitical relationships such as the deals between the mob and the trucking and auto unions. So insofar as unionization has been associated with leftist politics, the reality is the left proved to be fools who hear the talk but cannot enforce the walk.
The best answer is not a formal organization but an evolution of structure. In short, spread the wealth. By this, I don’t mean enforced redistribution a la Robin Hood, but by using the system levers to favor different structural arrangements. For example, a real change in the egegious asymetries in the US of the super wealthy (the 1 per centers) and the rest of us could be brought about by favoring employee-owned companies in Federal procurements. Stock-sharing won’t work because it is too easy to game that system in favor of short-timers. Profit sharing and real ownership are a better answer.
You are arguing from a merely theoretical perspective unless you have watched someone you love suffer–physically, emotionally, and spiritually–under the tyranny of union-supported corporate oppressors. Unions depend on coercive tactics to survive, thrive, and “negotiate” and so are designed to accrue power, not to achieve balance. The union is a form of institutional banditry: your money or your livelihood?
It sounds like a left-wing pile of crap, pure and simple. Why would anyone waste time reading this? Actually, why does anyone bother with Doctorow’s nonsense at the best of times? I think people just like saying his name; his thoughts are no more profound than the average online user…
@Skip, if you’re not interested in the book, that’s fine, you’ve already expressed your dislike of the author’s work. But then you stop going on about it too, because it’s not substantively adding to the conversation. No one’s saying you should read it, merely that you shouldn’t argue about the merits of the book or it’s message if you haven’t. If you’re not interested, don’t talk about it. (Sorry if I’m more snippy than I need to be. I’m grumpy for other reasons.)
@Raph, thanks for the heads up. I had almost forgotten that this was coming out.
@Prok, there seems to be a weird logical paradox in your thinking there. Cory is undermining choice by giving away his own work – which is fully under his control to do whatever he wants to if you believe in property rights – for free, yet it’s not undermining choice to suggest that he not be allowed to do so. It’s okay to deny individual rights when those rights threaten individual rights? How do we determine what’s a threat to individual rights on an objective level? Which individual rights need protecting and which don’t? Who decides? You’ve obviously found that Cory’s right to do whatever he wants with his writing isn’t as important as protecting a DRM system for everyone else. Cory obviously doesn’t agree. Which of you is right?
If we follow that line of thinking, don’t we end up with an arbitrary construction of values in which a subset of all people decide what’s good for all individuals in the group, dissension be damned? Isn’t that exactly what you’re claiming Cory’s after, just from the other direction?
I would say exactly the same thing back, flipped around — “until you have seen someone you love work in a sweatshop,” you don’t know the motives that drive union formation either. I even GRANT all the abuses of unions. But the entire body of labor law that exists today wouldn’t exist were it not for unionization and similar movements. And I am pretty sure those are protections that most people on this thread take for granted.
C’mon people — the thing most disturbing about this thread is the refusal to admit viewpoints other than the ones you already have! “I won’t read a book because I disagree with its politics” is backwards. The books you already agree with don’t teach you anything.
@Morgan, Would it also then be fair to say that you’re arguing from a merely theoretically perspective unless you have watched someone you love suffer-physically, emotionally, and spiritually-under the tyranny of completely unaccountable corporate oppressors? Would it be fair to invalidate your statement on the grounds that you didn’t live through the late 1800s and early 1900s when employer abuse was much more prevalent and unionization was the only thing raising working conditions at all?
In an unregulated industry where economic circumstance allows mistreatment of workers, the employer *also* depends on coercive tactics to survive, thrive, and be competitive. It’s a race to the bottom in an open system, because competitive advantage benefits from abuse; those that do not abuse as much as their competitors are quickly eliminated from the market. There’s a ton of historical example of this.
I think we can agree that any sort of significant power imbalance is a bad thing, and that unions are maybe not ideal in a properly constructed economic structure, but the question of how to get to that point is a tricky one. Certainly, in US history, unionization was a vital stepping stone toward legitimate reform. And once you out grow the need, you can, and probably should, ditch the system, especially if it’s also causing other issues. But sub-optimal incrementalism is a pretty universal facet of all reform. A universe with no collective employee bargaining power at any point in history is probably an even more flawed one than one that has it as a part of it’s social evolution.
On the other hand, a corrupted version of a system does not necessarily invalidate the system working as intended, unless the system by it’s very existence creates conditions that inevitably lead to corruption. Corrupt unions are only an indictment of unions if corruption is a result of impossible to modify incentive structures, and I think that’s not the case, though I could be wrong. Lassie-fare systems, on the other hand do not leave much room for doubt; the incentive structures *do* inevitably lead to corruption. Simple mathematical maximization for any individual business in such a situation is a net social loss; it’s a prisoner’s dilemma world when there are no rules on negative externalities.
All that being said, Raph’s made it kinda clear that he hoped the thread didn’t quite go in this direction, so I’m not going to follow up on this.
… Man, Raph, way to beat me to the punch. And in fewer words. And much more powerfully. ;p
Who here has read Sara Palin’s book?
I haven’t. But I haven’t read Hillary’s, McCain’s, or Obama’s either. In fact, I can’t recall the last political memoir I read. Probably Primary Colors!
I had a political science professor long ago who absolutely hated unions. While he admitted that unions achieved exactly what you said, that they were useful tools in the past, they are no longer a necessity because of “the entire body of labor law that exists today.” He was also fairly pissed off that union membership is required to work in his profession and explained that unions actually have a negative economic impact.
Should we praise unions simply out of respect for past deeds? I don’t think so. What matters is what they are doing now and how they will benefit workers in the future. Most modern unions, I think, are merely extensions of HR departments, fitted to serve their corporate masters—to provide the illusion of recourse. They have lost their way, radically evolving from a stated focus on workers to a thinly veiled focus on their own sustainability. (I say this as someone whose cousin is a union leader in Canada. I’m not ignorant of the pro arguments. I just don’t buy into them.)
In any system where corporations control a disproportionate degree of influence and wealth, they will exert a relentless pressure to repeal labor, health, safety and environmental regulation. The industrial propoganda machine in America barrages both political representatives and the general public with a steady stream of messages vilifying unions, labor activists, environmentalists, and any other person or group seeking to bring social externalities home to roost on the balance sheets.
Given the horrifying degree of human misery and suffering inflicted by unregulated corporate overlords in the nineteenth century, I take it as a blanket indictment of the failings of our educational system that so many people are so willing to give them another crack at it.
What your poli sci professor said sounds a lot like the sentence I wrote in my original post in the first place. 🙂
Would that it were so. It isn’t. Laws one can’t or won’t enforce are worse than none because they create the fiction of justice to which some will subscribe and endorse despite all facts to the contrary. How it works elsewhere, those locals can describe but here in the US without powerful lobbies, the laws will not be enforced. Ours is not an abstract universe. It requires real functions that make real bytes change state.
A good rule of systems implementation is to eliminate noise sources particularly those that can overwhelm a system with false signals that however attractive, are sugar water: tasty emotion inducers but other than getting someone to do something against their own best interests, valueless and harmful to the consumer. The Tea Bagger Party is a good example of what happens when those who cannot discriminate fact from fiction become activists while those who are overwhelmed become armadillos curled up in the middle of the road.
How many think Jim Morrison was a prophet and Robbie Krieger was just the guitar player? Who wrote the hits? How many think opening data to the web because then ‘magic will happen’ despite the fact that every industry that’s done that so far has collapsed as their market value flowed to the systems implementors away from the originators of ideas?
We need not be cynical because faith is a powerful contributor to resilience. We must discriminate based on our values because no other act tests the validity of our values as our willingness to accept no as the right answer. Raph is right: yes confirms but no teaches.
So Cory managed to take the concept of The Guild (Felicia Day) and turn it into a pot-boiler whereas she made a comedy. Something tells me Felicia wins the day with this one. I’d much rather laugh than despair.
“Worrying messes up your face.” Alfred E. Neumann
“The in-game stuff is spot on”
Seems like it’s viewed through a distorted lense still and glamorized like propaganda. It is a novel, however, not a theory, so that’s ok.
I boggled at the concept of the Game Gods selling currency by the millions to non-players. I thought he was talking MOOs but nope, definitely made it clear it’s the high fantasy market. That’s a plot device, yes? Seems like the SEC would be the conern then, rather than the IRS. I mean, if you want to make a money game the rules are already very well established. Is there already such a thing as leveraged derivatives shorting game currency?
7 out of the top 20 economies in the world are in virtual countries?
And what game exactly is Mala playing? One that isn’t available in English and takes a liberal view of IP law?
Haven’t finished it yet but I will say it is good yarn so far.
To me, unions and corporations alike are business entities with their own goals. You have to expect that they will go too far if they can. It’s a natural course of events that if possible, some thing will eat away at another thing. The only problem is when one gets an upper hand. “We the people” expect government to regulate so that doesn’t happen. The real problem has been, and continues to be, that the politicians have not been doing their jobs. Just like with the economic conditions that led to the recent problems.
@Morgan, Yes, we absolutely do get to sing the praises of unions when it comes to 1. historical context or 2. places in the world which still resemble the late 19th century industrializing nations. Given the context of the blog post, that means hashing out issues over whether unions in the US in the modern day are a good thing or not completely misses the point.
None of the issues you’re bringing up apply to say, China, where there are no real labor laws and unions are still illegal. And China is a huge part of the book’s focus, India coming up close behind. The US, let alone the rest of the first world nations, have an almost non-existent role, so whether unions can outgrow their usefulness is a moot point.
@robusticus, I dunno about you but I really want someone to actually *make* Zombie Mecha, it would be all sorts of awesome. And I’m not sure why no one has tried to make something out of Wonderland; that Savage Wonderland raid is delightfully evocative.
(Also, the virutal economy thing is not so far fetched. I believe at one point UO gold (or was it EQ?) was worth more, in terms of exchange rate, than the Italian lira, back when that still existed, though I’m sure Raph will correct me if I’m wrong on details there)
According to people I know that have been in both countries the work environment is different in the sense that US companies view you more as a game piece.
Contrary to popular belief: laws + social welfare + democracy in the work place does work. Social welfare reduce fear of retaliation. Democracy reduce tension (like having representatives on the board). Laws are important to set the standard.
Speeding limits does not work, because everybody breaks them. Right? No… they set the standard for how far you can go.
Law works to the point people make them work. Justice is not natural in the sense nature doesn’t provide it. Humans do. If the humans don’t work for justice, no amount of writing will accomplish it. That is why the illusions of justice are dangerous because they can mask a reality of action or lack of it that make the situation worse.
Never pass a law you can’t or won’t enforce. See illegal immigration.
Some company officials do exactly that, Ola. That is why if you have to choose employee ownership over stock grants, choose employee ownership.
@Ola:
I think you have to look to individual countries and regions for this. I mean, sweat shops are far worse in this regard.
I agree, however…..
Now union labor no longer has a private vote. The union leadership can see what their membership vote yea or nae to. It’s an ugly thing, and a big thanks goes out to Obama and company, sponsored by your local union #whatever.
The ugliness of control is widespread. It’s both out in the open as this is, and subliminal.
Our fine apolitical seeming host’s brother, Josh Koster, is right in the thick of this. He tells all about it in an article titled “Long-Tail Nanotargeting”, which our host had posted here some time ago.
It includes such gems as these…
As you can see, games are everywhere.
No need to reach for rebranding of old ideas, Changed American: frequency and amplitude versus facts. The increasingly easy to spot outcome is that an always on always and everywhere connected culture becomes febrile and this accelerates. This is being reported in studies of young teen age girls who habitually text.
It isn’t a surprise but something those of us with teen age daughters are starting to struggle with.
@Changed American: yes, I was referring to my own country, Norway, and white collar workers. I once were talked into taking over a course on software development methods after the course had started… (I should have passed on that one… Actually I did, but they were in despair…) Anyway, one of the books the student already had bought was about software process improvement, unfortunately the receipe success was so goddamn “fascist” that it would never have worked in my country, so I had to make the book “optional reading”…
Not that I am against discipline and CMM, but the idea of how to “think of” employees seem to be different on a rather fundamental level. Of course, this nation has had some luxuries that others don’t have. (We haven’t taken a toll yet in this economic downturn either).
A long time ago I was required to read a tiny, but well written, book called “windows on the workplace” by Greenbaum (IRRC). It was supposed to enlighten us about issues in the computerized workplace. Well, it kinda did, but it sure did not feel like it was relevant to my own country, because managment would have gotten into trouble fairly quickly if they treated their workers in that game-piece fashion…
Now, resource-full people like Conan O’brian obviously don’t accept being a game-piece, but he also has the luxury of having a lot to fall back on. He doesn’t need the safety net to stand up and say what he think is wrong… Most people (with kids) do need that safety net…
@len
And thus sway the system towards socialism? Great. Who’s going to start up new ventures under such “competitive” restrictions? Employees, doing it for other employees?
Socialism? You must mow Glen Beck’s lawn.
See SAIC. Employee-owned companies do well for their employees and customers. How well did 8A work out when the Captains and Colonels were running them under their wives’ names?
Ola, one of the reasons we have that is because of all the guidelines created as a result of the conflicts, both economic and racial. We’re a nation of laws, and it all has to be spelled out. That’s put everything, and everybody, “on paper” so to speak.
But it’s not that way everywhere. Just in the big places where this becomes such a primary concern. Outside of that, it’s pretty much something that comes from people’s personalities, maybe their education and backgrounds too.
There are many places where people are treated like people, and a more cooperative spirit rules. Probably very similar to what you are used to.
@Changed American: sure, you’ll find bad and good apples everywhere :-), and US coporations are bigger (and big means slower moves, more drastic measures, and more cynical thinking etc). I agree. Still, I think there are different expectations in the workforce that creates different opportunities for management. (And I think the legal/social rights affect those expectations).
I think one can make the same argument for MOOs, but local cultures are often supressed in favour of this “global culture”, because they are influenced through mass media. E.g. many players in the US love cussing, but they easily accept that they shouldn’t do it in public, for many non-US players such restrictions are viewed as downright silly. Can rules against cussing be upheld completely, of course not, but they set expectations and affect the norms. Same thing for the work environment, I believe.
Maybe gamer-unions could, in theory, change expectations in the player base and thus how games are operated.
@Changed American,
Pet peeve, but neither distributed ownership nor ownership by a particular strata are socialist. Employee-ownership isn’t inherently socialistic. Collectively, employee-owners may exercise their ability as owners to implement socialistic policies, but their discretion to do so stems from capitalistic ownership rights.
(Optional peeve-based rant: yes, “don’t screw your employees” is a “competitive restriction”. As is compliance with the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Don’t go there.)
@ola: The phrase one sees is norms and affordances: by locale/culture, certain behaviors and symbols are established as norms. By formal authority, certain affordances are provided that can use those norms.
Yes, it can vary and not always rationally. Where I live, some of the same people criticizing reduced NASA funding for manned space flight (we have a heavy NASA presence) are voting for a candidate for governor running ads against his opponent whom he claims supports teaching the theory of evolution. IOW, holding multiple contradictory positions can be normal and afforded. The thread of consistency is compartmentalized thinking based on what is good for the thinker. More exaggerated examples of that can be found in classic sociopathic personalities.
Cultures can enter a state that is similar to individual sociopathy where all norms and affordances are set to favor local needs and desires even if these are at odds with global needs and desires, and in fact, that is quite common and a basis for much political activity. In short, all politics are local. It is this kind of aggregate effect that makes Federal/State balance of power hard to maintain. In America, we tend to use money to smooth it out and in systems with no fixed means of setting values (eg, no gold standard) there is a correlation between inflationary pressures and social disorder (money inflated to keep social conflicts from manifesting).
Games easily model these kinds of relationships. The challenge is the hidden couplers or superstitious learned relationships (norms) that out suddenly can cause the emergence of unpredicted behaviors. Modeling scale is a problem (how close does the model come to modeling individuals).
Peter S., I don’t know what you are arguing. We agree on what you said. The difference in my comment was over an expectation to support one kind of ownership over another. If that were the rule of the day, the kind of ownership getting the benefits determines if there’s a political ramification to it. And if it’s willful, then it becomes an agenda.
And on your comment about competitive restrictions, those acts you sited apply to all companies. There’s no competitive restrictions there, outside of competition from outside the country. We have no disagreement there. But “don’t screw your employees” is another thing. I’m not for that, but there’s a better way to deal with it than making laws that apply to some but not all. And it centers on competition, through the creation of jobs.
If enough people are working that employers have to compete with other employers for labor, then labor starts getting treated much better. That includes this area of fair treatment, as well as benefits…such as health care. And in this case, all of these good things are paid for by productivity, as opposed to taken in greater heaps from lower productivity, creating even lower productivity in a spiral downwards as the costs mount upwards. That trend cannot continue without, at some point, those seeking control start telling “the people” something like…
“you don’t need that”….as in the mammogram controversy.
If there is a change of policy, there is always a political ramification. In this case, to ensure the current accelerating concentration of wealth is slowed and redirected. However, politics need not always be self-serving; they can be public-serving and this is the cultural shift required now just as it was when John F. Kennedy penned Profiles in Courage to point out in that time of cynicism that uncynical politics are possible.
There is a difference in tone between agenda and benefit. The means of “favoring” employee-owned companies in Federal procurment policy is not different in type from that of favoring 8A (minority owned or female owned) companies: to redirect wealth. The goal is different: to change the distribution of tax-derived transactions towards companies that does not exacerbate the problem of wealth concentrating in a shrinking number of individuals at an accelerating pace.
Capitalism need not be rogue: that is, it need not act as a predatory force as it does now in the US where the concentration is creating a lock-in attractor. Draconian redistribution would be inherently unfair. Policy-driven redistribution based on distributing profits directly instead of gameable stock or simply salary is fair and can change the distribution slowly. The reasons to favor employee-owned companies are simple: a) it directly distributes profit, that is, real wealth. b) It incentivizes productivity. That is why I suggest you study companies such as SAIC where employee ownership incentivizes loyalty, innovation and cooperation.
It is just one idea for shifting our cultures away from their current Spy Vs Spy politics. We need reasonable workable ideas over “the party of no” and “that’s just the way it is”.
Len,
And this isn’t “draconian redistribution”?
You’ve obviously chosen a side.
“We need reasonable workable ideas over “the party of no” ”
So, the good of our country as a whole, rich included, isn’t your goal, but the good of the non-wealthy is. At the cost of the wealthy. Right?
So rights to what someone owns or earns takes a back seat, for the good of the non-wealthy, for the objective of redistributing wealth. Their wealth. Am I reading you right?
Well sir, you are throwing out rights and freedom in the pursuit of your goals, for the sake of some over others. You want to determine who has rights and who doesn’t. And you are willing to give that power to a leadership, to allow them to make those decisions. And you don’t expect that to ever come back at you? Good luck with that.
That’s why we have a constitution, to prevent exactly that from happening.
What’s wrong with regulating capitalism, as we always have (or used to)?
What’s wrong with breaking up monopolies, which our political leaders have been really slack with?
What’s wrong with regulating investment principles, which our leaders have failed miserably to do?
What’s wrong with regulating sound lending practices, which our leaders have not only failed at, but instituted through mandates?
And you know what’s really funny? These are not what the POTUS’s office is about. These are the jobs of Congress.
And those leaders you are willing to trust with this “draconian redistribution” that you don’t want to see, they are one and the same as those who’ve failed so miserably to perform the jobs of regulating these things. (And not I’m saying the Republicans did any better.)
Changed American, all the things you listed benefit the non-wealthy to the detriment of the wealthy too. Employee ownership doesn’t fundamentally distort things more than breaking up monopolies. Actually, it probably distorts things less than breaking up monopolies. It simply means that workers have a *direct* rather than indirect stake in the outcome of their jobs. I’m not sure how that can be considered bad.
But as to the broader point: a system which attempts to provide a level playing field for all of it’s citizens is by nature going to restrict the ability for the rich to become richer. Any system that does not is quickly going to be incapable of providing any upward mobility. You want a democracy? You need to prevent horrible imbalances in wealth concentration. Otherwise you will *always* end up with an oligarchy. If you’ve got a trend that’s moving toward faster and faster wealth concentration in greater amounts than ever before, you need to stop the trend, or you quickly find that only the people at the top can do anything at all.
The good of our country as a whole intrinsically requires actively attacking the good of the super rich, as they are detrimental to it’s continued existence as a free nation. There is a mutual exclusivity to the concept of the super wealthy and a functional democracy. That’s not to say that people can’t be rich, relative to their peers. Just that the top 1% of the nation’s wealth holders can’t control 80% of the wealth. Or 50%. Or probably even 20%. The right to do this is simple self preservation. Only one concept can exist, and since the whole functional representative democracy thing benefits *all* citizens, the small few who benefit from being super wealthy to the detriment of the entirety of the rest of the population *must* be thrown under the bus.
Eolirin…
First off, where did you get the idea that I’m against employee owned companies? I simply expect that they compete fairly with other companies, regardless of who owns them, employees or stockholders or individuals.
No, what you want is to actively attack unfair practices. Not groups of people based on who they are. “The rich” are not detrimental, in and of themselves. Some rich are, hell, some are outright criminal. You should be blaming the politicians, as I explained above.
Has things gone too far? Yes. With the help of these politicians. Had they been doing their jobs, it wouldn’t have happened. Now they want you to grant them even more power, to go along with their ever deepening control. They’ve successfully steered your thinking into blaming “the rich”, so that they can grab their money. And they tell you it’s for the good of the nation, and that they’ll take care of everybody. And they’ll do it at such a high cost that it will cripple our economy. But let me ask you this. Had America been a socialist or communist country all along, would we be better off today?
@len: can you explain what you put into the term “affordances”. I am used to interpreting the term as it was coined by Gibson, but that was low-level perception psychology…
I kinda dislike the term “norms”, because that kinda suggests that the world is static, homogeneous and beyond ethics of individuals… 😉 A good social dynamic would flow between storming-norming-performing… You need some storming and a catalyst for that, IMO.
I am not so sure about the need for employee-owned companies though. I think “a sense of ownership” is more important. You can have that if you believe in the product/work you create, like if your work is focused on reducing pollution, you can be a “co-owner of the ethics”, rather than a “co-owner of profits”. A priest doesn´t have to own the church, but he does need to know that what he does is right. An wholly employee-owned company would probably be very risk aversive, which isn´t always good for society.
Unfortunately, the no-regulation thinking has created a dysfunctional world where big entities can cut deals which creates impossible barriers-to-entry and reduce the quality and variation in products. E.g.: You cannot open your own food store, because the big chains will get the same products for a lower price. (I don´t think this should be legal, I think it should be more like the stock market). This undercuts variation and competition. Of course globalization has created problems that local unions cannot solve as well: “Free” market thinking and the lack of sensible trade barriers forces polluting and slave-like industries to China/India. I´ll never understand how western politicians can put restrictions on local production, yet not punishing imports of goods that does not follow the same restrictions. Clearly one should require the same standards for all products whether they are produced locally or not. This is not a good long-term strategy. This is political wrong-doing and coward like behaviour. Right now STONES and fish is shipped from Norway to China for processing, then shipped back to Norway to be used… That´s such a clever way to utilize oil…
Unregulated capitalism is flawed at the core, because consumers are not informed and smart, the world is not uniform, markets aren´t fair, and businesses and governments are more opportunistic than forward-thinking.
I am all for the self-made man and autonomy of the individual, but the current capitalistic regime is no more equipped for that than (democratic) socialism. At least with socialism the ideal is that talent and ethics should be more important than your inherited starting-point (both for businesses and people).
Or from another angle… the viability of a social species is directly contingent upon whether the social structure benefits EVERY individual. If many or most individuals are recieving less benefit from the social order than they might achieve apart from it, there is no selective pressure to maintain social behavior (save force or threat of force).
For most species, this is an evolutionary process, but a handful of animals (notably primates, including humans) can shift behavioral modes drastically in a brief timeframe.
Yukon, that sure sounds good, doesn’t it?
But look at the facts. What these politicians are promising is Detroit. That’s their legacy. If only Detroit could, you know, take more from other states, like any number of communist or socialist countries take more from other countries, to make their plans work to their visionary glory.
Of course not. It is a small change and a light push on the tiller to right a ship that is heeling over given the current rigging.
There are no sides here unless you believe that past administrations have waged war on the middle class. That’s not a useful actionable position. A better approach is to find and execute small but effective changes in procurement policies targeted at correcting the current excesses. Other changes such as investment reform, investigation of criminal acts with appropriate punishment, and so on are also actions to be executed. The current problems did not occur overnight or accidentally. Deliberate and paced redress is the best course as well as enforcement of existing laws and new ones as needed.
That is how an intelligent system adapts.
Unless these individuals are colluding, it isn’t an oligarchy. It’s a panarchy. It’s important to know which because law enforcement depends on establishing the facts of the situation. In other words, that kind of concentration can occur with multiple groups discovering and playing the same games, exploiting the same loopholes, and so on. If the game enables this, the game is flawed. Otherwise all the energy will be directed into ultimately fruitless prosecutorial actions that create an even greater cynicism and reinforces the “that’s just the way it is” response.
Clarity is all important.
Let me ask this another way. Say you sign up for an MMO. If the rules of the game were such that
a) Some players are granted more powers and points at entry than others by several orders of magnitude
b) Unless they play very badly, these players can earn more points at orders of magnitude greater than other players
c) After some number of plays, all of the affective powers are concentrated in these privileged players such that the game rules make it impossible to beat them and in fact, if anyone tried to change those rules, they have the power to stop them or to add more rules that cause anyone who tries that to lose position, and in fact, they can accelerate their acquisition despite already occupying all the top slots
why would you want to play that game unless you are one of the privileged players?
Eolirin:
A system which attempts to provide a level playing field inherently encourages competition. Take a race track: each runner is placed at evenly distributed positions so as not to provide any individual runner with a longer or shorter distance to run. In this equality-based system, the object is to emphasize the skill and talent of a single runner—a winner.
Equality and fairness are therefore not synonymous. While equality encourages competition, fairness encourages cooperation. Equality assumes that any group of individuals will have the same needs as any other group and thus provide for only a specific set of needs. Fairness, however, recognizes that individuals have different needs and seeks to provide for those needs on an individual basis. A race track designed as a fairness-based system would place some runners closers to the finish line and some runners farther back.
Equality and fairness systems are each neither right nor wrong. They are both useful for achieving specific outcomes. Thus, I don’t subscribe to your belief that economic inequality is the problem that you describe.
Referencing bad mockumentary/journalism isn´t going to further intelligent discourse… Detroit was completely dependent on a single industry. That´s their problem. Silicon Valley could end up in the same fashion.
Let´s take a look at which countries have even distribution of wealth: Wikipedia/Gini Coefficient. The social democratic scandinavian countries and Switzerland are doing best. Then Canada and Europe. Then take a look at USA and China…
Correction: Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Bulgaria appears to be the best ones on the gini-map… Duh. Then follows Germany, Austria, Iceland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Czech… Then Canada, Europe, Australia etc.
Yeah, science is funny that way.
If the benefits of operating efficiencies achieved by interacting socially accrue mostly to a limited subset of individuals, the social structure is inherently unstable.
If the benefits of operating outside the social structure exceed the benefits of operating within it, self-interest will compel the individual to leave the social order, unless forcibly compelled or behaviorally conditioned to stay.
Conversely, if a social structure is flexible enough to reverse a growing concentration of resources amongst a limited pool of individuals, that structure will be more robust. The distribution need not be perfectly equitable, but it must be sufficient to provide even the least-advantaged members the assurance that their position within the social order is markedly better than their position would be without.
The Adam-Gotta-Go-To-Harvard incident is revealing. It’s an example of what happens when access to the highest rungs through the education route runs through a narrow pipeline. In other words, what he did is morally wrong for any number of reasons, but in terms of game play, justifiable. He discovered he could cheat to win and the payoff was worth the risk. And he was winning until he took it a step too far. We could argue that he had other options where the payoff was of value, but it’s hard to beat the cred of a Harvard degree culturally despite any other values that off set it.
And to me, that’s a fundamental: the rules of the game reflect the values of the game. If the rules are fundamentally skewed and one still plays despite the low probabilities of winning or the high risks of ruin, something is wrong with the player or the environment in which they play.
Then there are the games designed to turn one toward a set of strategies or habits that may be socially questionable for some n of social. Two examples are a course Harvard is alledged to have taught to law students: “Strategic Misrepresentation” and Werewolves or Mafia Wars.
Wow, not unlike comment threads in Corey D.’s posts 🙂
Quick, late note to Changed American: sorry, yes, was thinking globally rather than domestically. My apologies, and likewise for misunderstanding you (am replying from work while on break 🙂 ).
I’ve been away all week, so sorry for restarting this, but:
@len, yeah, sorry, you are right, there is a difference there. In all fairness, I was going for the structural issues require structural solutions angle, though. I think we’re pretty much on the same page with that.
@Morgan, that seems like a point somewhat removed from the context of the issue I was raising though. Income equality is not the same thing as equality or fairness in a general context. It’s only a measure of how much wealth concentration there is. Strong concentrations of wealth have distorting effects on social power structures, and especially on political power structures, making it impossible for a free society to exist when there’s too significant a concentration of wealth. I agree that it’s not a moral issue, something that can be defined in terms of right and wrong, but I never described it as such.
But not limiting the ability for wealth to concentrate heavily in a relatively small amount of individuals is like setting up your race so that a small handful of indivdiuals are placed 10 feet from the finish line, while the rest of the competitors are placed 10 miles from the finish line. And then you make the people that win the race be able to determine the rules for the next race.
I think we can agree that this leads to a relatively degenerate condition for racing.
@Yukon Sam, it’s a little more complicated than just utility. There are some human irrationalities that are wired in genetically as well, but I guess you can put that under behavioral conditioning, even though it’s not quite right in terms of describing what’s actually happening. In any event, the point holds generally, it’s just that that the math ends up having something of a variable factor that needs to be overcome before anti-social action will occur that is in excess of the amount of utility to be gained. Basically, if you just look at utility people will stick with the group more than you’d expect, but the wider the divergence between utility in and out of the social structure, the more likely it is that people will abandon the social order.
Oh, oops. I should point out, people will break away from the social order much more readily, if there’s enough people *also* doing it. It’s easier to start a counter-culture than it is to become a lone rebel. That variable amount depends on a *lot* of factors. To the point that it might even be able to get negative under certain conditions.
We are on the same page, definitely. I’m pointing out the difference to move the debate away from Spy vs Spy (the rathole to nowhere politically) to explain to CA why the arguments he’s using are functionally dead ends. The smart course is to use low impact changes and thump the system back into balance without destroying it. It’s awfully weird to read the Mises Institute arguments for behavioral approaches to economics when they resist the notion that systemic adjustments can alter behavior by changing the reward structure much the same as we use gain controls on sound boards.
But that isn’t what you are doing by suggesting that certain business’s get a priority of favoritism. You are suggesting that the race results are fixed in another direction, and that’s just as bad. The people putting on the race are responsible that the race is fair so that those who should win the race do indeed win it. Those who should win the race are those who have the talents and put in the work (training, etc.), and you are suggesting that some should be given a shorter run. Just some different people.
No, what needs to be done is fix the referees, not “fix” the race itself in a different way.
Extremely abstract view:
Advantages tend to compound over time, as do disadvantages, a basic positive feedback loop simply in one or the other direction. Analogy aside, it’s about introducing negative feedback into the system to prevent individuals from hitting either extreme (since, as a closed system with finite resources, a trend toward infinity would end in monopoly in the single fastest-accelerating individual).
Negative feedback isn’t always fun and isn’t necessarily what feels fair. However it is necessary to create a trend that stabilizes. (The questions then of where, how, and how much are the devil-in-the-details spots that define different economic systems at a core level.)
Actually, no. The bids are fixed to give competitive advantages in any procurement you can name. The lists of requirements are long and detailed and quite often to create competitive advantages for social engineering. The 8A companies are one. Minority hiring is classic. If you bid for work in Seattle, you have to prove you provide insurance for same sex couples. The list is endless.
So a proposal is made to favor employee-owned companies. Note, not prefer to all other exclusions and inclusions because weighted systems typically have multiple weights with cost and fidelity to the technical requirements having the most advantage.
What referees should we be fixing? The technical evaluators, the contract cost evaluators, the laws that prefer in-state companies?
The notion is simply to prefer a better distribution of the profits to the employees. How do you oppose that if the result is a slow dissolution of the concentration of wealth such that it increases innovative pressures by making the importance of the innovative solution greater given the reduction in the emphasis on size (eg, the Lockheed Martin’s, Boeings, etc) where concentration of wealth is creating second order effects in governance?
Right now, I’d love to see BP roasting on the spit but the claims are made that they are the ONLY company with the capacity to fix the problem they created. So where in all of this does size and concentration benefit the people governed or the customers served?
Uh, I didn’t suggest that certain businesses get a priority of favoritism. I suggested that allowing individuals (or corporations, I suppose) to develop too much wealth is bad because it distorts the system; you need to prevent power concentrations. That is, no one can be allowed to have an advantage that goes beyond a certain level because it leads to a situation in which the system cannot remain open. It’s not about favoring one group, as much as cutting down anyone that gets too big to a more reasonable level. When you’ve got a set of trends that leads inexoriably toward an unsustainable conclusion you need to change those underlying trends to prevent things from collapsing.
The defining part of the analogy, the really important bit, is the last line about who gets to set the rules: the refs in this case are decided by the people who previously won the race. If you don’t change the rules, you don’t ever have the ability to fix the refs. You need to make sure that no one group has the ability to determine who the refs are. You can’t do that if one group keeps winning all the time and no one else has a chance. It doesn’t particularly matter whether they’re winning because they’re just plain better, because they worked harder, or for any other reason because you still end up with the same self reinforcing problem.
@Raph- At the risk of derailing the thread… Thanks for providing the link to the book. I read it on jury duty last week. I enjoyed it and thought there were pieces of it that did excellent treatments of economics for folks who don’t have a grounding in the science. That said, it felt like he kept writing after he ran out of material. There were several times when I thought I had accidentally lost my spot and was re-reading an earlier section. Definitely could have benefited from some more aggressive editing
Matt, I think you are RE-RAILING the thread. 😉 Glad you enjoyed the book!
Extremely abstract view:
Advantages tend to compound over time, as do disadvantages, a basic positive feedback loop simply in one or the other direction. Analogy aside, it’s about introducing negative feedback into the system to prevent individuals from hitting either extreme (since, as a closed system with finite resources, a trend toward infinity would end in monopoly in the single fastest-accelerating individual).
Negative feedback isn’t always fun and isn’t necessarily what feels fair. However it is necessary to create a trend that stabilizes. (The questions then of where, how, and how much are the devil-in-the-details spots that define different economic systems at a core level.)
@Steve,
I think the quote tags ate your reply (somehow).
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