The winner-take-all society
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What Hacker News says
- This particular author (Robert H. Frank) is not pushing a particular narrative to justify dismantling of family unit.
Where did you find an attack on the family unit in the article?
Upon reading this article I started reading his 1996 book The Winner-Take-All Society .
The book is quite prescient in that the professions with similar top heavy compensation structures have multiplied since.
He is well aware of fallings of state run economy.
- I don't agree with your last paragraph, as I have different values, but as far as your first one: this is the essence of 'hypercompetition', and it's bound up with our winner-take-all system / superstar effect.
Anyone who hasn't read "Twilight of the Elites" and "Average is Over" should do so.
Winner-take-all society: http://prospect.org/article/talent-and-winner-take-all-socie...
The superstar effect: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/business/26excerpt.html?_r...
Non-stop retraining: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/22/business/to-stay-relevant-...
My personal preference would be to accept this as the new reality and give better societal supports to allow people to compete (as Twilight of the Elites makes clear, you need more equality of outcome to enable equality of opportunity vis a vis education, tutors, etc.) like debt-free college and retraining programs, GBI, a more comprehensive unemployment system, etc. Rather than trying to roll the clock back, we should instead embrace it and allow people who want to be part of the race to have the tools to compete, while allowing those who would rather not to step away without starving and becoming homeless.
- I wanted to reply with an off handed comment but i checked myself because this is a good and thoughtful comment which doesn't take the discussion off topic.
Unfortunately your comment is not applicable to this scenario, as someone who has worked in marketing at Procter&Gamble i can tell that it is about the shift in attention from tv and radio to the internet. Search was the first big disruption and it's measurability was par to none. This caused a shakeup in brand management and companies now had to focus on the zero moment of truth, a step up from the first moment of truth and the internet owns the zero moment of truth for products. Startups/Entrpreneurs and VC's enticed by the windfall profits of google and yahoo started pushing for ideas that could attract more eyeballs and as a result the younger generation have grown into the facebook era and have not been trained in other forms of business.
So what we have is a vicious cycle where entrepreneurs create attention grabbing startups, where the measure of success is x amount of users and then sell this advertising demand to google,yahoo, etc since they have the ad inventory to make use of that demand. This is why yahoo bought tumblr. This is also why most(not all) VC's don't really care about actual businesses that generate revenue by selling goods or services, it's too hard and it is too hard to get aquired. Basically you reduce their probability of a win, since two of their three exits are taking off the table, being exit to bigger ad comapny or aqui-hire leaving creating a profitable business on the table.
The bottom line is this, you are the spaghetti that the VC throws to the ceiling to see what sticks, thier appearance at tech conferences and startup competitions are to align you with their vision of what they want you to build. You have the illusion of choice, they say wearables or food tech and startups lineup to be the spaghetti.
This is a winners take all game, where VC's are chasing black swans like facebook, instagram, tumblr and the more of you that lineup to be spaghetti, the better their chances unless the "price" of spaghetti goes up. Pls read this book or the comments at least to understand the effects of this, http://www.amazon.com/The-Winner-Take-All-Society-Much-More/... .
At this point we are all trampling over each other to be the one that takes all and this has tipped the balance in the VC's favor until we have a shakeout, the hype dies down and entrepreneurs move on to other industries like banking. I would argue that this is the time to get into finance mabe use all the data science tools and start a Hedge Fund because those guys that left the HF industry before 2008 for tech probably had it easier. Bottom line, ask yourselve how many photo startups have been started vs sold for a $billion dollars, instagram will be the only one "winner takes all".
If not then pls watch this guy from startup school 2008, it is the highest probability for you to succeed in this overcrowded goldrush. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2UXPfz_Kgk
- Not in any particular order, but I'd highly recommend these interesting books:
How to run a Thriving Business - Ralph Warner (the founder of Nolo book)
The Death of Ivan Ilyich - Leo Tolstoy (I read this based on a recommendation by a fellow HNer)
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions - Dan Ariely.
The Winner-Take-All Society - Robert H. Frank, et all.
Gun, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond.
- Absolutely.
I read about this "conundrum" that a CEO doesn't work 1000 times more than a regular employee, so why should he get paid that much, in the book "The Winner- Take-All Society" by Frank and Cook. At the time the argument sounded reasonable.
But it's not. A CEO doesn't work 1000 times harder, but his work is for sure 1000 times more impactful that the work of a regular employee.
Just compare Nadella with Ballmer. Ballmer was running the company into the ground, so much so that Paul Graham wrote an essay declaring the death of Microsoft [1]. One way or another Nadella found a way to turn the ship around and bring it back to be one of the top 3 companies in the US, and maybe in the world.
Now, take a random sample of 1000 regular employees at Microsoft. They work hard, but if they leave tomorrow and are replaced, and sometimes even if they are not replaced, Microsoft will be just fine. If Nadella leaves tomorrow, it's not at all clear that Microsoft will be fine, because we know of times before him when it wasn't fine.
- I think a more insightful analysis than (the insufferable) Taleb's one is the "Winner takes it all" one:
> In our 1995 book, The Winner-Take-All Society, Philip Cook and I [=Herbert Frank] argued that top salaries have been growing sharply in virtually every labor market because of two factors – technological forces that greatly amplify small increments in performance and increased competition for the services of top performers.
That might combine with the "saliency" cognitive bias - it's easier to think of successful actors, writers, game authors, than of unsuccessful ones.
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2011/12/how_...
