The dirty secret of capitalism - and a new way forward

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The dirty secret of capitalism -- and a new way forward | Nick Hanauer

I'll post some comments later.

Heard 5 minutes of it so far. Hoping to hear more when I get a bit more time to hear more videos. Would be easier for me to take in if there was a written transcript. I have a dodgy short-term memory and a slow brain. It's a good brain but it's slow.

I've seen this guy before, he makes some good general criticisms but I don't know that he's ever shared the alternative model that he intimates in the back half of this video? I've heard about the 'donut' model and the idea going forward for sustainability would be closed-loop economies but... the catch is we'd all have to pull our shirts in, voluntarily, which makes it impossible (defectors will dominate anyone who volunteers to do the right thing).

That's why we would need the government to help create the right incentives.

On an international scale, we would need international treaties to help create better incentives also.

The only problem is the majority of the world's richest people aren't interested, and will fight it tooth and nail.

I'd really recommend Daniel and Nate's discussions on this topic. Daniel as I've mentioned is a very circumspect thinker, probably even more so than anyone I've heard to date. He's had other discussions previous to the one I'll share below and it sounds like both he and Nate are getting ready, in their next episode, to discuss solutions. The one thing Daniel is very sensitive to is the issue where almost any move that needs to be made in any direction is stepping on another group's specific interests quite often and the challenging but proper thing to do is come up with solutions that bypass that particular issue (he's previously described this as how so much of politics as stalemated energy by and large going up in heat without results).

TED talks have transcripts on the main website. This one is at https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_the_dirty_secret_of_capitalism_and_a_new_way_forward/transcript

They own the Government.  Governments make treaties.  We are at the mercy of the wealthy.

Thanks That's a much better format for people such as me.

Having read the transcript now, I think the points he makes have quite a lot of merit, and they're quite similar to my own thinking about the flaws in the assertions that the wealthy often make. So, nothing particularly new to me. He doesn't really offer any solutions except that he says he's pushing for laws for more redistribution, and that the current system is over if we want it to be. I wish him luck with that, but I don't think he'll make any appreciable difference. I think he's just preaching to the choir - even that question at the end looks like it was stage-managed.

The story I was raised with is that the honorable thing to do was to be hard-working and that the big sin in the world was laziness. For the last ten years or so I've seen the opposite side of that - ie. frantic social-climbing, back-stabbing, and mercenary behavior of the sort that one would doubt could raise a healthy generation to follow it, and it seems like you'll always have some degree of both (laziness and mercenary socioeconomic climbing) and neither can be eliminated rather it's deciding which is the lesser of the two evils to then tune the dials in that direction. IMHO I'd rather have more people watching TV all day rather than the whole family and the dog being self-styled Machiavellians. There's always the risk that if everyone's got bread, circus, and distraction, that something really dystopian takes that system but any solution really should be about trying to figure out what the actual happy medium is rather than one extreme or the other.

Yes the buzzword "hardworking" often gets past the goalie as if it was axiomatic that working flat out was the only respectable way of life conceivable. It's a staple ingredient of advertised job descriptions, and it's not negotiable. Who would be hired if, at the interview, they described themselves as merely "fair-working?" It's anathema to an employer to hear that a mediocre day's pay deserves only a mediocre day's work, because employers feel entitled to something for nothing.

Personally I have some respect for laziness. Somebody (possibly Bill Gates) said that he'd always consider giving a task to a lazy worker because that was the worker most likely to find the easiest, most efficient way of doing it. And to the degree that laziness equates to loafing around while "society" carries the dead weight, who is the laziest, a benefits recipient who has no intention of getting a job (not that the benefits system makes that easy - you're very lucky if you can avoid having your benefits repeatedly challenged even when you want to work), or a bigwig on 100 times the average wage who does little more than maximise his gain on his invested capital?

One very hard lesson I learned was to never give 100% unless you absolutely must. Because I did give 100% my first month at the job, which meant that they kept expecting me to give that much and more! Naturally, I couldn't maintain that.

Hard work is important but yeah, only give 100% when necessary. Otherwise burnout is inevitable. Nor will you necessarily be rewarded for working that hard. If you show yourself to be valuable in a particular role, your bosses will likely want to keep you in that role instead of promote you.

What ToughDiamond said above applies here as well.

I had two multi-year projects where I had to give 100% for almost year-long time periods. It was so bad during summer of 2020 that for seven days a week I woke up, ate worked, went to sleep, woke up, ate, worked, I'm pretty sure I was doing something north of 110 hours per week for several months straight (for 40 hours pay) based on employer incompetence, client belligerence, it was my first programming job so wherever there was a reality gap between client and vendor it got made up in the middle with me.

All I can say is I'm incredibly lucky that I'm a supplements nerd, I almost lost both my digestive health and bone density (had been on and off proton pump inhibitors for years already and was juicing myself with caffeine). Just narrowly missed hospital trips several times. Another thing that I had to periodically was dose, I microdose psychedelics because it helps me with my ASD but in this case plenty of times when I was working through the evening I was on a partial hit of LSD.

If you have idiots asking you to do the equivalent of lift the back of a bus with your bare hands and no one can comprehend what they're actually asking you to do - that's a dangerous place to be because they can take you apart via your own sense of accountability (I sometimes think medieval torture techniques that missed accountability of the tortured, like the victim needing to hold a block up with their hands and feet not to be stabbed by it, really missed the most insidious way to force involvement of the victim and make sure they had absolutely no peace).

In that context destroying someone's health with work is a significant distance over the line, and I'm not sure where the line starts exactly but 'ordeal by assigned project' is f'd.