A capitalist economy is an "empathy vacuum". This is just more vilification of Silicon Valley in the midst of the post-Trump election, where coastal residents are mad "fake news" and social media organized "flyover" states into, well, voting for Trump, and are looking for someone convenient to blame for the fact that a marginalized semi-rural population organized against globalized interests. There is a lot of irony in the fact that most East Coast-based established media is spending all this time talking about how there is no empathy in Silicon Valley, when the people in the Rust Belt that voted Trump into office would say exactly the same thing about the New Yorker and its "elite" ilk.
There is nothing about Silicon Valley that has any less "empathy" than many non-tech organizations. If the financial incentive structure runs against this ideal of "empathy", it happens and is bound to happen. End of story.
The empathy vacuum is real in finance, politics, health insurance, petroleum, pharmaceuticals, law, law enforcement, and virtually any other large bureaucracy in which individual actions are rewarded in spite of impersonal behavior. At the end of the day, people are rewarded for what they bring to the economy, not the mental happiness of a populace, which is not always quantifiable or captured by the market.
There is nothing about Silicon Valley that has any less "empathy" than many non-tech organizations. If the financial incentive structure runs against this ideal of "empathy", it happens and is bound to happen. End of story.
The empathy vacuum is real in finance, politics, health insurance, petroleum, pharmaceuticals, law, law enforcement, and virtually any other large bureaucracy in which individual actions are rewarded in spite of impersonal behavior. At the end of the day, people are rewarded for what they bring to the economy, not the mental happiness of a populace, which is not always quantifiable or captured by the market.