Author of the study they were writing about here. That is the original expectation I had coming in, but I don't think what we find is totally consistent with that (although some is). We talk about that in the paper. Study here: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers....
Great work. Thanks a ton for climbing onto the hackernews thread!
When I look at chart in the article (I haven't read the paper) I get really curious about how 'support for regulation' might break down by issue. A lot of the regulation that the Trump administration is rolling back are environment rules that are strongly net positive for our economy once you account for health care externalities. While many of the regulations that hurt the economy the most (e.g. restrictions on urban housing construction.) are unchallenged.
How do you think the results would change if you broke "regulation" down by type e.g. environment/labor/business? I suspect there'd be a significant break between tech elite and the republican donor class on environmental/global warming issues. I also think there's a significant break between the tech elite and some democrats on zoning reform. Though I haven't conducted formal surveys :)
I think this is particularly interesting as it's the one issue were the tech elite didn't look like 'normal democrats' in your graphs - perhaps that outcome is more nuanced then the graphic shows.
It's hard to tell exactly what the underlying principle is from just the few questions we could get folks to answer, but the general pattern seems to be about like you describe -- on the environment, founders are pretty liberal; on issues of labor and product market regulations, they're fairly conservative; on everything else, they're fairly centrist. We have all the survey questions we asked that went into this index in the Appendix.
The only way in which technology entrepreneurs deviate from what you would expect, is in their support for more redistribution. But all these people are not paying normal taxes, anyway. Why would they care? Also if you consider the risk of political or economic instability, then even redistribution might just be a self-interested policy stance.
The same logic holds for founders in other industries but they don't seem to like taxes/redistribution much (although we need and are getting more data on that). Would have been nice to ask about taxation on capital gains, but survey space was limited (you folks are busy!) and that is a relatively small share of federal receipts so not as important substantively, even if it speaks to this theoretical question.
There might also be a best-use-of-capital explanation for that discrepancy. A manufacturer with a cash surplus can typically open another factory, but how does a company like twitter usefully spend excess revenue? Tech CEOs may be more in favour of redistribution because they would have to figure out what to invest in, whereas CEOs in other industries already know what they'd like to do with the money.
Maybe tech companies know that they profit from redistribution, perhaps moreso than other companies? Tech products tend to be relatively expensive, but production is generally unlimited, because a significant proportion of the price reflects the fixed costs of development, which means that a larger market usually comes with profits. This is somewhat unlike e.g. agriculture or construction, where production quantities are more difficult to increase.
The primary reason I support it, and I don't think I'm alone among founders in this, is that I think that society is not going to work very well in the long term unless we strengthen our social safety nets. I want to live in a society that functions well, because I'm happier when surrounded by happier people.
I also think that it would enable more people to take the risk of trying something new if they knew that failing didn't mean destitution, and I think that we'd see significant upside from that in terms of economic competitiveness. I think I should be paying more taxes than I am to fund that, especially on unearned income.
There's an important distinction, however, between redistribution that seeks to create a more free and just society and retribution that seeks to prevent a society without consumers.
Most tech people in favor of redistributive schemes like UBI are in favor of the later.
Ah, well, I'm in favor of UBI and both of the reasons you mention for it - the free market is still the best way we've found to allocate resources to worthwhile projects.
I'm pretty sure SFO always has functioning ILS, otherwise the airport would have to close every time there was even mildly bad weather. Each runway has its own system, though, so an individual runway's ILS can be turned off.
If there was fog, they wouldn't have been using 28L.
In a foggy situation they would've used ILS or even autoland. Looking at instruments instead of out of the window would've prevented this much earlier.
Because when you're coming in on runway 17L at DFW, all nice and programmed into your autoland, and suddenly the controller tells you to switch to landing on 17C, you have to just fly the plane. If you muck about trying to reprogram your autoland you'll be halfway to Oklahoma before you're set up again. See the video I linked in another comment in this thread for more details and examples of why complete automation is undesirable.
There were incidents in the past where pilots didn't have enough experience flying the aircraft manually. For that reason, most airlines prefer if pilots land manually as often as possible so that they can do it in case the system fails. If you always land automatically, pilots lose situational awareness.
These kinds of councils have nearly no influence; they're photo ops. But leaving does signal that Silicon Valley $ isn't going to play along with Trump, which Republican Members of Congress are going to care a lot about as they think about how to raise money in the future.
> This is really unfortunate. If you're in the "Trump is a mad man" camp, don't you want voices of reason like Kalanack's to be in his ear?
I see the point, but this business council isn't going to meaningfully influence policy. The policymaking apparatus is huge and this is a tiny, tiny piece of it. However, it does send a signal to Republicans in Congress that the tech $ they want will not play along with Trump. That's a quite important signal.
Fun fact: in Tokyo prices are 3x lower than in the bay area, in large part because new housing is legally much easier to build.
If you want to make the bay area more affordable, check out the great work these folks are doing to legalize building new housing: http://www.sfyimby.org.
Aside from engineering/software development (which is maybe 10-20% of the job market), the average college grad only makes about $40k in Silicon Valley out of college.
it helps but theres far not enough high rise habitations in tokyo itself. its crazy when you see the number of small shacks and 4 stories building in many places.
The city doesn't have enough room to add many more jobs. This is like saying a restaurant that fills its tables every night must be in a bubble because it hasn't grown past its capacity. Right? (Not saying it shouldn't have more room (building). But as a descriptive matter...)
It's standard practice for states to salt their voter lists with fake names. If, e.g., a non-political solicitation shows up to the fake name, the sender is caught. Same thing with FEC data -- politicians have to list their donors publicly, but it isn't legal for other politicians to solicit those people, and the FEC enforces it with salting.
What's funny is the best study would involve picking some people at random and giving them a basic income -- something YC could easily do. Theory can only get you so far on this one (although would be necessary to interpret the results of an empirical study).
Full transparency could have negative unintended consequences. For example, if surgeons knew their success rate were public, they would be incentivized to take easier cases. Who would take a difficult case if they knew it would constitute a bad mark on their record almost for sure?
Fundamentally, the issue is that it's impossible to observe for any given patient if that patient's outcome would have been better with a different surgeon. This is the same challenge we face with evaluating drugs: many more people who take aspirin survive than those who take anti-cancer drugs, but this likely reflects the kind of person who is taking each (people with headaches vs. people who have been diagnosed with cancer). To solve the problem there's no way around randomized trials. So, one idea would be to randomly assign patients to surgeons.
(Transparency might still be better on net, but important to keep these issues in mind.)
In places where they have implemented outcome tracking they give patients risk scores and adjust based on those scores - which in itself is tough (bias to give patients worse scores), but you have to start somewhere. I've had this discussion a few times and fundamentally I believe that transparency is better than the zero objective information we have now - currently we don't even know how many operations a surgeon does - let alone the outcomes!
> For example, if surgeons knew their success rate were public, they would be incentivized to take easier cases. Who would take a difficult case if they knew it would constitute a bad mark on their record almost for sure?
Why would it be a "bad mark" if everyone understood the case was difficult? Given a difficult case, wouldn't a surgeon be graded badly only if they did poorer on average than other surgeons tackling similar cases?
As long as a case's "difficulty" is measured in a consistent way, I don't see how surgeons would be incentivized to avoid difficult cases.
Good question. Perhaps that is one of the root issues here. As a layperson, I wouldn't know how to answer it, but I'm guessing the answer probably involves more rigorously detailing the various aspects of each case so that comparisons can be fairly made across surgeons treating similar cases--apples to apples and all that.
