A different cluetrain

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/02/a-different-cluetrain.html

by robin_reala • 11 years ago

154 83 11 years ago

HarryHirsch3• 11 years ago

The extreme short-termism of capitalism that stifles innovation is missing from the analysis. Right now we are seeing an overinvestment in Sillicon Valley and an underinvestment in Biotech. The money is flowing to ad-selling services like Google and Facebook, and to intermediaries like Uber and friends, but biotech startups are funded below replacement rates. The development pipeline is drying up, it's not that the IP wasn't there, it's just not getting funded. Locust investors like Valeant don't help either. (Their business model is to buy up companies and then immediately divest of R&D.)

Any money in biotech goes to cancer instead of antibacterials, because the price points of cancer medicines are highest. The future was in the news last week: superbugs spread through colonoscopy procedures in LA. We'll see more of that in the coming years, but there is no alternative funding model within sight.

yummyfajitas3• 11 years ago

Investment in biotech is low because the returns are low, not because of a high discount rate.

It's getting harder to discover new drugs and get them through the FDA gauntlet. Most of the low hanging fruit has been found, and additional fruit won't necessarily pass comparative effectiveness without huge (and expensive) trials. After it makes it to market you are subject to political risks - price controls, lawsuits over side effects too small to find in clinical trials, etc.

It's hardly clear that the valley is even a good short term investment. Most tech companies focus heavily on growth, not profits.

Why do you believe that biotech has higher long term returns than the valley?

HarryHirsch3• 11 years ago

Why do you believe that biotech has higher long term returns than the valley?

That's precisely the problem. Within my lifetime the current antibiotics will become useless, we will be where we were before 1937 (discovery of sulfanilamide), physicians will be as good as they always were at prognosis, but helpless in the face of bacterial infections. The apocalypse is coming, and capitalism is no tool against it.

hga2• 11 years ago

"additional fruit won't necessarily pass comparative effectiveness without huge (and expensive) trials"

Ah, that may explain the statistic I recently saw that Phase III trials are taking up 90% of the budget necessary to bring a new drug to market.

dragonwriter• 11 years ago

Investment in biotech is low because the returns are low

As I understand, investment in biotech is low because the time to realize returns is long, not because the returns are low (even after adjusting for time). The time it takes to bring a product from concept to market in biotech is virtually an eternity by Silicon Valley standards.

SideburnsOfDoom3• 11 years ago

The extreme short-termism of capitalism that stifles innovation is missing from the analysis

What would that add? Civilisations don't have to innovate. In fact, the people on top may be perfectly happy with stagnation and the status quo.

itg• 11 years ago

"underinvestment in Biotech"

have you looked at biotech IPO's as of late. I would say the complete opposite.

Kiro• 11 years ago

Stifles innovation compared to what? I don't think there's any system that stimulates innovation more than capitalism.

TheOtherHobbes• 11 years ago

Of course there isn't. Capitalism guarantees no such system is allowed to exist.

But capitalism is based on jam today and famine tomorrow.

This works just fine for people - as long as they're not thinking straight.

Intelligent resource allocation understands that famine ten years from now is a bad thing and should be avoided, even if it means lower short-term profits.

Any system that thinks ahead like that would be much more innovative than capitalism, because it would be able to make long term plans and invest in long term projects with pay-off times measured in decades or even centuries - something capitalism is manifestly unable to do.

It would also be better at avoiding the usual capitalist kooky idiocies like poisoned water tables, avoidable drought, accidental anti-terraforming, and the rest.

xioxox• 11 years ago

Public funding of science and universities stimulates more innovation. The stuff you see from companies took years of research in universities before they pushed it the last few yards.

murbard26• 11 years ago

The market's horizon depends on the world's population time preference and risk aversion as a whole, not on the whims of venture capitalist.

Why? Because arbitrage. If the world as a whole has a low rate of time preference and risk aversion, investments will flow towards high potential long term projects rather than short term ones.

But what if you're a greedy, myopic VC with high time preference who wants to make money now? That doesn't affect too much how you will value deals. What you care about is how much money you will make at the exit, which will depend on the equity valuation at that point. And that valuation, depends on the global investment's community risk aversion and risk preference.

Facebook trades at a P/E ratio of 71, meaning the equity is worth 71 years of current earnings. Netflix has a P/E of 116. Think that's shorts-sighted?

Ultimately, investments come from two sources, money saved and invested by individuals, and banks.

If it were only the first, you could say that the type of investments you see reflect the society you have. As a whole, society picks taxi cabs now rather than maybe some pharmaceutical product later. It's not capitalism, it's human nature.

Banks complicate the picture, since they turn their deposits into loans of various maturity. The rates on these loans are ultimately tied to central bank policies.

However, these policies generally attempt to keep rates low, so as to stimulate "productive" investments. In addition, various bail-out guarantees tend to artificially increase the amount of risk taking.

So there you have it. Capitalism by itself merely represents the time preference and risk preference of the population as a whole, and central banks tend to make it more risk taking and longer terms than investors would actually prefer.

username223• 11 years ago

And that valuation, depends on the global investment's community risk aversion and risk preference. Facebook trades at a P/E ratio of 71, meaning the equity is worth 71 years of current earnings. Netflix has a P/E of 116. Think that's shorts-sighted?

Most humans aren't trading on earnings, but on market psychology, believing they can sell to a greater fool in the future. And most trades aren't even made by humans, but by HFT algorithms trying to win massively-leveraged short-term bets for a fraction of a percent. The Facebook and Netflix P/E ratios have very little to do with long-term earnings.

jjoonathan2• 11 years ago

It's not capitalism, it's human nature.

I disagree. Capitalism makes investments much more fungible than they would otherwise be, changing the incentive landscape. It can set up a prisoner's dilemma (i.e. a failure of global optimization due to induced local optimization) which preferentially allocates capital away from investments which are intrinsically difficult to value in a timely fashion or intrinsically difficult to capture value from (i.e. science).

Correct tulip speculation gets you $$$, making a correct incremental step towards curing cancer gets you nothing on the market. Nobody will be able to tell if your contribution was valuable for the next 30 years, and by then you won't have any mechanism by which you could retroactively hold back your contribution in order to obtain a fair market price for it. According to capitalism, this unfortunate (but completely incidental!) state of affairs is a good reason why investors should speculate in tulips rather than fund biotech. Yuck!

Can we do better? In the narrow sense of solving this particular problem, the answer is yes: a prestige-based economy (see: academia) is able to reward investments whose value can't be captured by a market economy, such as the "incremental progress towards cancer cure" example above. Of course, a prestige-based economy would fall flat on its face if one tried to generalize it to more mundane facets of everyday life, so it's not a satisfying solution for the general problem. But it IS a good way to get free-market drum-beaters to acknowledge their very constrictive assumptions about timely valuation and value capture :-)

nosuchthing• 11 years ago

It seems detrimental that large scale organizations are short sighted to 4 month (quarterly), annual, and 2-4 year (election) cycles.

Asphalt is cheap yet requires high maintenance and degrades quickly - rather than a larger initial investment in concrete which lasts 4 times as long.

grandpa• 11 years ago

The "cluetrain" in the title refers to the Cluetrain Manifesto from 1999: http://www.cluetrain.com/book/95-theses.html

bonn1• 11 years ago

While I find the post a bit odd I value the 3rd bullet legitimate for debate:

Since the collapse of the USSR and the rise of post-Tiananmen China it has become glaringly obvious that capitalism does not require democracy. Or even benefit from it. Capitalism as a system may well work best in the absence of democracy.

I am also quite impressed and wonder how China got there where it is today in the absence of democracy. But I am not sure if I would agree with the OP since there many examples where states economically failed/are failing and assumingly because of the absence of democracy.

cstross• 11 years ago

See also Singapore, arguably a democracy in name only. Or its neighbour Malaysia, ditto (and rather less successful).

I could cherry-pick examples until the cows come home, but I suspect other factors are at work -- and not just the obvious cultural stereotypes (look at how the two Koreas diverged after 1973, for example).

SideburnsOfDoom3• 11 years ago

An example of an undemocratic failing capitalistic state does not repudiate the statement "capitalism does not require democracy", but an example of an undemocratic succeeding capitalistic state proves the statement. And we have several examples of such states. Logic is like that.

nothrabannosir• 11 years ago

While technically true, this is not pure logic, and his statement is more nuanced. To note:

Capitalism as a system may well work best in the absence of democracy.

That's written in English, and it is reasonably interpreted to mean more than \not(capitalism-works-well \implies democracy). The author suggests capitalism-works-well \implies \not democracy.

sp3324• 11 years ago

Even though the government is not configured as a democracy, Chinese people seem to be generally OK with what the government does. So they still have most of the benefits of "consent of the governed".

PakG12• 11 years ago

We don't yet have enough data to say if he's correct. I would posit that the fact that China is where it is today is due to his Afternote C, not his Bullet Point 3. There are massive structural risks inside of China that are difficult to see in the media, risks that are more difficult to have in a democratic system that tries to guarantee freedoms.

These are cracks in China's economic foundation that a lot of hot money foreign investment has been able to cover up over the past couple of decades. Risks due to population migration problems due to the hukou system, environmental problems stemming from short-sighted industrial investments, government corruption that grew and grew due to lack of separated oversight and his Bullet Points 4 and 5 (which only recently seems to be seriously considered an existential risk to the government's existence; but again, time will tell if this is for real), and more. The level of control of the government over the economy also goes against the tenets of free markets (although I suppose you can then get into an argument as to whether it's possible to have capitalism without free markets).

I'm not saying that his Bullet Point 3 is wrong. I'm saying that it's too soon to call China a reliable data point for making any long-term overarching claims.

edit: clarification

gwern2• 11 years ago

Let us wait until Chinese per-capita PPP has equaled, never mind passed, the USA or other major Western countries before we start singing its hosannas about how wise and effective the Communist Party is at overseeing an advanced highly-efficient capitalist economy.

We've heard this story before, and it didn't work out well for the USSR.

TazeTSchnitzel• 11 years ago

The USSR wasn't really capitalist.

Also, you don't need to meet Western development to be a success. China has incredibly high growth rates and Deng Xiaoping's "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" (i.e. the mixed economy) basically saved China.

VLM2• 11 years ago

There is a simpler failure mode, the guy who decides what numbers to report, and how, decides the outcome, and the data from China is more corrupt than our own data, which in turn is more corrupt than the data from the USSR Pravda era.

On a small scale its fox guarding the henhouse corporate metric evaluations. You pick the winners and losers, and by how much, then you design todays metric to match the conclusion, then you use numerological processes to gather numbers for the metric. Thats the way the real world works.

lisper• 11 years ago

many examples where states economically failed/are failing and assumingly because of the absence of democracy

Can you list some of these "many examples"? And in particular, can you list some examples of states that don't have democracies but do have capitalism and are still failing?

ubernostrum• 11 years ago

But I am not sure if I would agree with the OP since there many examples where states economically failed/are failing and assumingly because of the absence of democracy.

From a logic point of view "X does not require Y" does not entail "X must universally succeed when Y is absent". So a counterexample to the latter statement is not a counterexample to the former.

kordless3• 11 years ago

I'll just remind everyone this is the same Charles Stross that wants Bitcoin to 'die in a fire': http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-wa.... Beware taking advice from individuals in the throes of massive cognitive dissonance.

wavefunction• 11 years ago

So? I don't see anything wrong with someone being anti-bitcoin and all his points seem salient. His points in this piece are well-considered and argued as well.

I would downvote you but I'm just going to register my disapproval of your sort of criticism, which seems empty and baseless.

kordless3• 11 years ago

Oh, don't worry. There are plenty of anti-Bitcoin people around here who will do it for you.

knowaveragejoe2• 11 years ago

Not only does this sound like Ad Hominem, but I also think you are taking that statement too literally... the very sentence it's contained in should give a clue as to where his sentiment lies on alternative currencies(emphasis mine):

I want Bitcoin to die in a fire: this is a start, but it's not sufficient.

sp3324• 11 years ago

I think the part you have in italics was referring to BTC losing half its value.

kordless3• 11 years ago

It may sound like ad hominem, but that would mean I was "responding to arguments by attacking a person's character". That said, I'm definitely making blaming statements, so it's fair you made the observation. I'm pretty sure cognitive dissonance isn't a character trait so much as it is a current state of thinking surrounding a given topic, which in this case is global finance. I've read Stross, and like his works, but I am attacking what he is saying (currently) about a given topic. I think it's also fair to point out he makes his own ad hominem arguments: "Bitcoin (is bad b/c) mining software is now being distributed as malware". I also think it's fair to say, when observing illogical remarks from an individual, that they may still be conflicted on the topic.

lmm• 11 years ago

Huhwhat? Bitcoin is the most extreme capitalist thing approximately ever. It is by its very nature a mechanism for capitalism to work around democracy, both in the obvious sense of avoiding democratic laws against e.g. drug trade, and as a tool that makes e.g. political bribery a lot easier. Stross is not being at all inconsistent.

mikeash2• 11 years ago

What cognitive dissonance, exactly?

DanielBMarkham• 11 years ago

I agree with the other commenter that "capitalism does not require democracy" is interesting enough to kick around. The rest of it seems more and more tenuous the further you get down the list (and the more things that are combined in some sort of quasi-logic to reach a conclusion). I'm not saying the guy is wrong, just that there's a lot to digest there -- too much for a forum like this.

From what I've read, there are clear things that separate various civilizations. A quick list that I pulled out of the air might look like this:

- Private property - Rule of law (contracts) - Freedom of political speech - Consent of the governed - Ability to freely associate into commercial units (corporations) - Peaceful transfer of authority

Societies that have these things, on average, are able to solve more problems for more people over a longer period of time than those who do not. These problems are usually solved from the bottom-up; whether through innovation or grassroots political efforts, distributed, self-optimizing systems beat centralized ones.

The various forms of democracies that we see instantiated usually have more of these things than the other types of governments we've tried as a planet.

Capitalism refers to a very specific type of financial arrangement. It seems to map man's desire to trade with the above values -- at least as good as anything else.

To say "captialism does not require democracy", then, is true -- but it's woefully incomplete. The Chinese are getting away with rapid growth because they've met many but not all of the criteria, and that's only for the last decade or two. The problem with the statement is that it wants to form a broad conclusion about complex topics using simple language. If you do that, you miss out on the important parts. This is also the problem with the rest of the list. Do enough of this and string a thread through it, you can prove pretty much any dang thing you'd like.

sp3324• 11 years ago

So to stop this from becoming violent, we need a peaceful means of transfer of power that can keep up with "internet speed". Or the bureaucracy of government needs to absorb everyone who has political legitimacy and use them to continue expanding, which I think has been happening lately. Or we could find a way to "financialize" labor.

PakG12• 11 years ago

Would you prefer public policy that changes at the speed of high-frequency traders on the stock market, or at the speed of long-term investors that analyze at the level of Warren Buffett (true value-oriented investments) and storied venture capitalists (big-play game-changing startups)?

sp3324• 11 years ago

It's not that policy should change constantly, but that people who make policy tend to lose legitimacy in a very abrupt way. Transfer of power has to be very rapid, or people will rebel and stop following the leader.

guelo2• 11 years ago

I think student loans are the financialization of labor.

murbard26• 11 years ago

I mostly agree with the axioms as stated, but there's an obvious subtext that is more questionable and that carries a few unstated assumptions

- Democracy, or more generally giving political power to the people is a good thing, maybe an end in itself.

- Increases in inequalities between capital and labor are intrinsically a bad thing.

If your focus is on people being able to live happy, fulfilling lives, the whole Maslow hierarchy of need thing, it's not clear at all that these assumptions are warranted.

istjohn• 11 years ago

Those aren't assumptions. Axiom 18, the final conclusion, states, "we're on the receiving end of a war fought for control of our societies by opposing forces that are increasingly more powerful than we are." The reader is left to decide whether that is a good or bad thing.

Edit: And if you are labor, if you are the people of the democracy, of course these things are bad. It is self-evident. It is not a hidden assumption, but rather falls out of the conclusion. No one wants to be under the finger of another's control. These things are only good for capital.

murbard26• 11 years ago

You're right of course, these aren't stated assumptions which is why I mentioned the subtext.

I could of course be reading Stross's intentions wrong, but given what he's written before, and given how widespread those assumptions are, I tend to think they're taken as a given.

bryanlarsen• 11 years ago

Upvoted because you made a good point. Good point, but wrong, in my opinion.

- “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” -- Churchill.

- technological progress is making everything cheaper except for land, labour and political influence. Having only the rich able to afford those three things is very dangerous in my opinion. Sure, the poor can afford bread and televised circuses, but I'm not sure I think that makes a good society.

VLM2• 11 years ago

Democracy is the opiate of the masses. No need to rebel, here, just select one of two hand picked identical candidates with no substantial policy differences outside unimportant hot button social issues, no need for mob violence to change leadership when you can vote (just remember not to "waste" your vote on a 3rd party non-hand picked candidate, because they're not under our thumb!)

The inequality problem sets in when you expel most of the labor force from the economy. The economy no longer has space for them, no longer needs them, no longer will let them in to participate. I'm sure the teeming masses of bored angry resentful aspirational young men will never respond violently like they always have in the past. Nope no demagogues will become leaders, LOL. Assuming there's no revolution, what happens to the economic refugees when the population is 99% refugee? They'll need some way to get the requirements of living, which seems to involve currency and an economy, or they'll die. But they have the perma-economic-death-penalty so they can't participate, and we'd like to think the 1% won't kill them, so immovable object meet irresistible force.

Being in the UK Charlie has absolutely weird ideas about gun ownership and rebellion. True a 18th century napoleonic war with civilian gun owners on one side and the conventional army on the other would be just a bit one sided. The actual result would look a lot more like Afghanistan or Iraq or Vietnam or Somalia, you know, the places where the army lost the war? When an angry well-enough armed population dramatically outnumbers the army, the army loses. Maybe a couple million civilians will die, but the army is still going to lose in the end. Then out come the guillotines for the 1% leaders for their war crimes or revenge or whatever. Sure would be nice to avoid this outcome, but we're not even trying, not in the least, if anything we're not steering away from the brick wall we're stomping on the accelerator. Talking about 18th century strategy being all thats possible is almost intentional disinfo, which is weird coming from Charlie.

Gonna be a fun century!

knowaveragejoe2• 11 years ago

I could not disagree more with most of what you've said here. The beginning seems to rely on the assumption that no change occurs in politics anymore - "we" are simply being screwed and that's the end of it. This is precisely the view of someone who isn't involved and is informed entirely by outrage-porn articles. This also belies the frankly uninformed worldview that it's "us" and "them", which could not be farther from the truth.

Later you imply that armed revolution would actually lead to a reasonable outcome. Clearly you have never heard the phrase "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" and are unaware of the perhaps dozens of examples throughout recent history where this fits the picture to the T. You are also ignoring the reality of the conflict in Afghanistan, where the military enjoyed remarkable success against a foe that is more resourceful, elusive and better armed than that vast majority of the even the most hardcore, gun-toting, anti-government survivalists here in the US.

I'm also sensing based on your willingness to adopt violence as a potential "solution" that you don't have the faintest clue what armed conflict, let alone combined arms warfare, is actually like. There is a reason we avoid it. This sort of sentiment is not only totally unproductive but it's possibly contributing to the problem by adding non-solutions to the noise.

Here's a question for you - can you quantify what the metaphorical brick wall we're supposedly careening towards is?

metaphorm2• 11 years ago

that should be democracy with a small d. Stross wasn't referring to any particular system, polity, or party. he was talking about the general philosophy of political power that is based on the assumption that sovereignty is intrinsic to the people and that governments are granted legitimacy due to consent of the governed.

I also don't see Stross assuming that democracy is an end in itself. I think he is commenting on the projected future of existing nominally democratic systems of government.

I do agree with you that Stross assumes that increasing imbalance between labor and capital is a bad thing. I agree with Stross though. We've seen the political and economic damage that can occur under regimes with excessively high inequality. We should try and learn from history and not repeat past mistakes.

mcguire5• 11 years ago

If we assume that you are living in the non-democracy, and are on the less-equal side of divide (in other words, the majority), how exactly does your opinion on the given screed matter?

lukev2• 11 years ago

This is very insightful.

I wonder however if his partitioning of the economy into "labor" and "capital" isn't a bit too black and white, though.

In particular, it leaves out knowledge workers who are capable of implementing automation, inventing new products, performing new research. These activities can be fueled by capital but they are gated by a not-entirely-fungible resource; namely, skilled individuals, that I'm not sure it makes sense just to classify as "labor". Such individuals could wield considerable influence, aside from capital.

I can't help but wonder what kind of an effect (if any) this observation has on his analysis.

guelo2• 11 years ago

These knowledge workers will continue working automating jobs away until their own jobs are automated.

lukev2• 11 years ago

At that point you've reached a point where humans are no longer the dominant economic players at all, and this discussion is moot.

JackFr• 11 years ago

Since the collapse of the USSR and the rise of post-Tiananmen China it has become glaringly obvious that capitalism does not require democracy. Or even benefit from it. Capitalism as a system may well work best in the absence of democracy.

It's tough to respond to statements like this as written. 'Capitalism', 'democracy' and 'work well' are not precise terms, and the statement can be either true or false depending on the shade of meaning.

metaphorm2• 11 years ago

I think you're searching for reasons to disagree based on semantics and technicalities and evading the very cogent points made by the author. While there is room for disagreement about some of the nuances of what is meant by "Capitalism" or "democracy", do you think that there is really any comprehension problem w.r.t Stross' use of those terms? It seemed perfectly clear to me. His usage is quite conventional.

What about the quoted passage do you actually think is ambiguous?

craigyk2• 11 years ago

It always struck me that socialism is the economic system that in theory appears to be closest/compatible with democracy. Then again, I think what has actually become obvious is that mixed economies are what seem to work, to which I'd add not just having rules, but changing them often enough to prevent gaming of the system. So maybe in a sense messy is good not just because the real-world requires messy solutions, but because you got to keep people on their toes. Let's face it, laissez-faire or pure socialism, the weak point in either case is people subverting the system.

mikeash2• 11 years ago

You've neatly summed up why computer people have so much trouble talking about the real world.

Some things are inherently imprecise. We can talk about them anyway.

api• 11 years ago

William Gibson got the essence and the aesthetic of it in Neuromancer in 1984.

thornygreb2• 11 years ago

I have a CS degree from 1990. It's about as much use as an aerospace engineering degree from 1927

I'm not sure there was such a thing as an aerospace engineering degree in 1927, but if you think a CS degree from 1990 is worthless than you didn't learn much. That theory is still applicable today. Just because the shiny bits on the outside look all new and fancy does not change the underlying theory one bit.

mcguire5• 11 years ago

I don't know about the existence of a degree in 1927, but graduating in that year would put you among the designers just before and during WW-II---i.e. the fastest period of aircraft development.

So, yeah.

dceddia• 11 years ago

The theory sure is applicable, but employers don't pay for theory. If you got a CS degree in 1990 and stopped learning the day you graduated, you'd surely have a hard to finding a job in 2014.

The CS field moves at an especially breakneck pace, though. The half-life of the knowledge learned in school is very short.

There are probably some other degrees out there where the knowledge stays relevant a bit longer. But I think it really comes down to the fact that you need at least some degree of continual learning to stay employable after graduation.

thornygreb2• 11 years ago

You are confusing computer science with software engineering/programming. They are not the same.

The CS field does not move at breakneck pace. The core classes taught in CS are the same now as they were then.

tonyedgecombe• 11 years ago

The author is a full time writer so it's quite possible he no longer uses the knowledge from his studies.

mcguire5• 11 years ago

That's funny, I also have a CS degree from 1990 and I use it every day. Further, I've found it puts me rather significantly ahead of many of my programming coworkers. But I'm not a novelist.

On the other hand, I suspect that I'm in the "eye-wateringly rich" category (as is everyone reading this on HN).

pdkl95• 11 years ago

...most of their activity will be devoted to the perpetuation of the organization, not to the pursuit of its ostensible objective.

aka, the tyranny of the bureaucratic overhead equation

    Δw = p ln (st / sg)

    w  := "useful work towards the objective"
    g  := "the group of people doing w"
    p  := "effective productivity of g"
    sg := "total size of the g"
    st := "total size of the organization (sg + bureaucracy)"

A different cluetrain

Related Stories