hpkuarg

It's more possible than you think for people who share the same ethnic background to have had radically different experiences from each other, and people who look very different from each other to have gone through very similar life stories.

I'm not just saying this in theory (which is trivially true) -- I lived in a stereotypically liberal cosmopolitan city where most people I encountered, despite the visible diversity in their ethnic backgrounds, all had four-year degrees, worked in high-paying knowledge-based jobs, and had no experience in military service or single motherhood; then in a much smaller city in a stereotypically conservative rural state where most people were of the same ethnic background, but had more variety in what they went through in life. My own habits did not change between the two cities as to put me in touch with such a different group of people between them.

This is just anecdata, but I question the premise you appear to take for granted.

> Refusing to give alms to the poor "because it would discriminate against the rich" seems obviously fallacious to me.

In what way is this obviously fallacious? Alms have to come from somewhere, and if you take them from the rich then it is clearly discrimination against the rich. You could very well make the argument that this is justified, but fallacious it is not.

That aside, it doesn't take a lot of scanning through those who purportedly wish to give alms to the poor before you find some outright revenge-driven rhetoric.

Why would anybody want to trade with Mr. Smith's contract in particular when a market for the contract still exists, with market makers and other participants providing bids and offers that is better what Mr. Smith can do? At least, assuming you are talking about a regulated commodities futures contracts like those which trade on the CME.

"Some government intervention" has dramatically increased over the past century (after having stayed relatively flat for the century before that, since Adam Smith first came into the scene with groundbreaking ideas), so the boring position isn't so boring anymore. The government has their fingers in so many pies these days it's hard to say what even are the remaining relatively free markets.

Obviously we cannot do controlled experiments here the same way we can in the physical sciences, but it seems that historical evidence is pretty clear by this point on whether freer markets perform better than ones with more government intervention.

That's not how it works! You can't just make up a valuation when you donate things, and whatever higher valuation you get, you have now incurred capital gains on which you must pay taxes.

Only tangentially related, but let's not fall into the fallacy of the middleman -- middlemen are only bad if they are legally or otherwise monopolistically required to be there. In other situations, they add value in the connecting of producers and consumers.

Thank you for pointing me to this -- apparently it's not so classic that I have read it already. ;-)

Since I assume you didn't write it, I won't go into a point-by-point rebuttal of the points raised in this piece, but in the interest of keeping up the debate I will mention a few things.

Like many who think along these lines, there is a base fallacy assumed here by the author, which is that absent discrimination, the distribution of tech workers will resemble the distribution of the larger population. Perhaps it is the classical liberal tradition (that "all men are created equal") that leads us to believe this, but there is no reason to believe that any slice of the population must reflect the broader whole, no matter the subject at hand. Over half of the players in the NFL are black and only 0.1% Asian, out of about 13% and 6% of the general population respectively. About four-fifths of all cab drivers in the US are male. Billions of people enjoy running around the world and many millions compete in it, but the Kalenjin of Kenya comprise a stupid number of those at the very top levels of distance running. It's entirely plausible that Chinese, Indians, and Vietnamese (as mentioned) enter the profession at higher rates and succeed at higher rates than other groups without involving a cabal that favors them over other groups, or indeed even personal biases for or against.

This isn't to say that personal biases don't exist and the numerous anecdotes of objectionable behavior encountered by individuals who don't fit the typical "tech bro" mold are invalid. But words like "discrimination" must be precisely defined, and I favor one where it means legal or policy-based exclusion or subjugation of certain groups, contrasted against personal biases ("racism" when it comes to ethnic groups, "sexism" in gender, etc.). When older folks get fewer callbacks from interviews or women are seen as girlfriends at tech conferences, that's personal biases at play, but it is not the same thing as being discriminated against. When you conflate the two you head down a dangerous path that we're treading as a society now, which is the tendency towards totalitarian control of people's thoughts; and this cost must be weighed against any benefit.

It's interesting that the author specifically mentions the Townsend-Greenspan firm vis-a-vis the gender pay gap among economists, because that was a very example of where capitalists motivated by profit took advantage of the fact that women were paid less for equal work, hired such women for slightly more than their competition while still getting the same output, thereby both raising women economists' wages and making out with a handsome profit. It's an argument for letting the market play out. (I do question why the firm dissolved when Greenspan was appointed Fed chairman, instead of continuing on with their more competitive labor.)

This is getting long, so I'll conclude by reiterating what I see as two very salient points from the essay: "The market is just humans. It's humans all the way down", and "We can fix this, if we stop assuming the market will fix it for us".

Yes, the market is humans all the way down. The beauty of free markets is that it leaves the decision-making to the individual humans involved, and not an enlightened group of elites who think they can fix it by meddling. History is littered with examples of people who thought they can "fix this" and ended up making it worse -- so much so that we have a saying about it.

If you're interested in exploring this angle more, I'd be happy to point you to a few works in the literature who have made the argument way more clearly than I ever could.

It's not some immutable law of capitalism. There is such a thing as diseconomies of scale, where firms that are too large end up being less competitive and unable to innovate as quickly. Once they reach that size they might borrow the power of government to crush competition and retain their monopoly, but at that point we may as well it call a feature of socialism, not of capitalism.

I'd be surprised if in twenty years of market forces (that is, assuming neither government antitrust action nor cronyist behavior making competitors illegal) more people were using Google for search than they are now.

One man's environmental crisis is another man being lifted out of crushing poverty by the abundant energy and wealth produced by that same industrialization and profit motive.

Unless you think cavemen shouldn't have burned sticks for warmth out of concern for CO2 emissions, the way out for humanity will be through (further technological gains enabling more energy expended per capita, hopefully cleanly), not backwards.

Seems strange that we'd optimize for making modifications easier, when such modifications are much fewer and farther between than the everyday living that fills the time between, during which people value a solid wall with no gaps or seams.

Of course, not everyone values the same things to the same degree, and a homeowner could cut a 4x8 piece of drywall into smaller pieces and have more easily removable panels like you're imagining.

Larry Haun's book The Very Efficient Carpenter. Comes with companion videos that you can find on YouTube, as well.

"In any market" is too strong a statement. In markets with high barriers to entry or other factors that make it less competitive, sure, and we call them natural monopolies. But you're claiming that every market is a natural monopoly.

There's about four thousand four-year-degree-granting institutions in this country. How much recruiting should Jane Street do at all of them?

Why not? Having a company with multiple billions of dollars doesn't in itself produce any returns without high quality labor to work it, especially in competition against other such multi-billion dollar companies. It might not fail this quarter or next, but inevitably they'll be chased out, if in fact the recruiting practices lead to lower productivity.