Inequality and the Sergey Brin Effect

http://www.american.com/archive/2008/september-october-magazine/inequality-and-the-sergey-brin-effect

by prakash • 18 years ago

33 20 18 years ago

zandorg• 18 years ago

I have read most it, so I hope I'm accurate as to its meaning. But Sergey Brin is an outlier, because as an immigrant he started a tech company. The only other example of this I can think of, is Max Levchin of Paypal, etc. I don't see a guy with a lemonade truck as being as profitable as Sergey.

Another point is, those lemonade trucks will be expenses, and most of the lemonade profits will go to those loan costs. Sergey started off with a low-spend company.

13ren• 18 years ago

Andy Grove

mhartl• 18 years ago

They picked Brin because he is famous, but he's meant to represent all winning "players" (those who play in economic tournaments with winner-take-most outcomes), not just those who become billionaires.

ojbyrne5• 18 years ago

I'm actually another example of an immigrant founding a tech company (though I've moved and traveled so much I have a hard time thinking of myself as an immigrant as opposed to a "world citizen"). I'm an immigrant to Canada, and eventually (and temporarily) an immigrant to the US. My non-immigrant partners decided to push me out and have since demonstrated their complete lack of creativity and drive. Though they're great at manipulation.

nihilocrat• 18 years ago

I'd argue that you have a leg up being an immigrant. When American tech workers think of "immigrant" it is very probable they interpret that as "some guy who is better than me, works longer hours, requires less pay, and has no capacity for laziness or stupidity thanks to his brainy robot genes, who is going to steal my job". Americans, on average, are honestly probably lazier, less educated, and demand higher pay than their foreign-born counterparts, but I am pulling that out of my ass so feel free to cry foul on me.

wheels2• 18 years ago

Jerry Yang, Ruppert Murdoch, Shai Agassi, Miguel de Icaza, Loic Lemur, ... Paul Graham. :-)

...and that's just off the top of my head.

wheels2• 18 years ago

Also just noticed that Trevor from YC is an immigrant (though, admittedly, from Canada) -- so 50% of the YC co-founders immigrated to the US.

pavelludiq• 18 years ago

Sergey Brin and Britney Spierce are in the same category? I didn't know that.

ojbyrne5• 18 years ago

"There is also another factor at work. A trend is underway in America for marriage to be increasingly “assortative.” That means children of well-educated parents tend to marry one another and the children of less educated parents tend to marry one another. This was less the case a few generations ago. For example, sociologists Christine Schwartz of the University of Wisconsin and Robert Mare of UCLA found that beginning in the early 1970s there was a striking “decline in the odds that those with very low levels of education marry up."

I'd be curious to see if someone has connected this to the rise of the Neo-cons. They're all about classism.

menloparkbum2• 18 years ago

This is interesting. From life experience (over-educated liberal parents, 4 years in Cambridge, MA, 1 year in Berkeley), the "left-wing" is as class oriented as the neo-cons (that is, if you can define "class" via degrees granted). I've been on the hook to marry someone with at least a master's degree since I turned 25.

ojbyrne5• 18 years ago

A master's degree is slightly different from a master's degree from a "good school." I've also been pushed to associate with well-educated people, but not necessarily from schools with high tuitions.

hugh3• 18 years ago

I forget where I was reading an analysis of this kind of thing the other day, but it argued that there are really two middle classes: the commercial middle class and the academic middle class.

The academic middle class loves the lower classes (in theory) but can't stand the commercial middle classes, whom they see as ignorant boors with the temerity to earn more money than professors, while doing less work. This, I think, is what drives a lot of the contempt for things like SUVs, "McMansions", soccer moms, Sarah Palin, and all that other gunk that people in my circle seem to enjoy whining about nonstop.

hugh3• 18 years ago

OK, firstly, if this is what "neo-con" means to you then the word is sufficiently broad to have lost all meaning.

Secondly, I'm guessing this has more to do with broader demographic trends. Since the 1970s there's been a huge increase in the number of people who go to university, so a university-educated person has a broader pool of other university-educated people to choose from.

Even more importantly, while in the distant past there were significantly more men going to university than women (and as such there weren't enough educated women to go around), in recent decades the numbers have been more or less equal (though recently women have been overtaking men).

jyothi• 18 years ago

Two generations ago, a couple married to share production. Today, they choose one another because they have similar tastes in consumption.

joestrickler• 18 years ago

http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html

Inequality and the Sergey Brin Effect

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