GorT is going to attempt to weave together a few things today. Over the New Year’s extended weekend, GorT and family saw the movie Joy. I would recommend seeing it – just for the story, if nothing else. It’s not a must-see-on-the-big-screen as the cinematography isn’t going to win awards, the costumes aren’t all that, and there are no special effects of which to speak. However, the story of one woman’s persistence and determination is worth seeing. Particularly for the teenage crowd. I’m hoping that those that see it recognize a number of lessons:

1. Persistence and Determination are powerful – usually because they come backed with courage and strong beliefs. Having these qualities can power one forward in school, business, and life. People will complain about various inequalities but Joy is a story that breaks through those. Jennifer Lawrence’s character doesn’t complain and whine about the inequities of life (yes, she has one or two breakdowns), she powers through them determined to succeed.
2. Education and socio-economic status doesn’t absolutely limit where you can take yourself. The main character had no college education and was not in what many would call the middle class. Without giving away various plot points, she had some help from good friends (even when other relationships with some of them are completely broken) that allowed her to succeed. Which brings me to…
3. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. It’s not a sign of weakness – it’s a sign of intelligence. You know when you need it. Weakness and poor judgement gets shown by what you do with it. If you continually ask for help and don’t grow from it then it’s squandered. If you grow from it and do likewise (help others when they ask), that is when the help is most beneficial.

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.” ~ Calvin CoolidgeThis brings me to my segue – as I was reading through some of my Monday morning threads, I came across a link to this article  by Y Combinator co-founder, Paul Graham. The source link misleadingly implies that he thinks the path to addressing economic inequality is eliminating startups. I’ll leave that for now. Mr. Graham does a solid job of taking apart the problem and pointing at the driver of our current socio-economic situation:

The reason he [Mark Zuckerberg] and most other startup founders are richer than they would have been in the mid 20th century is not because of some right turn the country took during the Reagan administration, but because progress in technology has made it much easier to start a new company that grows fast.

Yes, there are flaws in the system and we get instances of a degenerate economic case; but I would argue, and I think Mr. Graham would agree, those aren’t the majority and not the main drivers of inequality in our society.

If the rich people in a society got that way by taking wealth from the poor, then you have the degenerate case of economic inequality where the cause of poverty is the same as the cause of wealth. But instances of inequality don’t have to be instances of the degenerate case. If one woodworker makes 5 chairs and another makes none, the second woodworker will have less money, but not because anyone took anything from him.

So here is the tie-in between my thoughts. Mr Graham continues later in the article:

Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven. Whatever their other flaws, laziness is usually not one of them. Suppose new policies make it hard to make a fortune in finance. Does it seem plausible that the people who currently go into finance to make their fortunes will continue to do so but be content to work for ordinary salaries? The reason they go into finance is not because they love finance but because they want to get rich. If the only way left to get rich is to start startups, they’ll start startups. They’ll do well at it too, because determination is the main factor in the success of a startup. [3] And while it would probably be a good thing for the world if people who wanted to get rich switched from playing zero-sum games to creating wealth, that would not only not eliminate economic inequality, but might even make it worse. In a zero-sum game there is at least a limit to the upside. Plus a lot of the new startups would create new technology that further accelerated variation in productivity.

Technology is a powerful change-agent. It drives our economy. There are plenty of economists (i.e. Paul Krugman) that will throw around ideas of various ways to control or shape it – particularly with government regulations – but it’s like water: deceptively powerful.

While the surface manifestations change, the underlying forces are very, very old. The acceleration of productivity we see in Silicon Valley has been happening for thousands of years. If you look at the history of stone tools, technology was already accelerating in the Mesolithic. The acceleration would have been too slow to perceive in one lifetime. Such is the nature of the leftmost part of an exponential curve. But it was the same curve.

You do not want to design your society in a way that’s incompatible with this curve. The evolution of technology is one of the most powerful forces in history.

Louis Brandeis said “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” That sounds plausible. But if I have to choose between ignoring him and ignoring an exponential curve that has been operating for thousands of years, I’ll bet on the curve. Ignoring any trend that has been operating for thousands of years is dangerous. But exponential growth especially tends to bite you.

This isn’t a force worth fighting – it’s something worth adopting and learning to use as a tool. As Mr. Graham points out, “We’ve barely given a thought to how to live with [economic inequality].” It’s part of the point of Volgi’s previous post, “To keep the Republic going, we’ve got to keep one eye on the principle that all men are created equal, and that a janitor is as fully an American as a hedge-fund manager. If we allow either group to view their interests as permanently antagonistic to the others’ the democratic project is over, and we’re back to the ancient bedeviling European agony of class.”

The entirety of Paul Graham’s article is worth reading. I suggest you check it out…and maybe some of his Lisp code so you can do crazy stuff like:

(defun assocify (source)
  (labels ((rec (source acc)
             (let ((rest (cddr source)))
               (if (consp rest)
                   (rec rest (cons (cons (car source) (cadr source)) acc))
                   (nreverse (cons (cons (car source) (cadr source)) acc))))))
    (if source (rec source nil) nil)))

GorT

GorT is an eight-foot-tall robot from the 51ˢᵗ Century who routinely time-travels to steal expensive technology from the future and return it to the past for retroinvention. The profits from this pay all the Gormogons’ bills, including subsidizing this website. Some of the products he has introduced from the future include oven mitts, the Guinness widget, Oxy-Clean, and Dr. Pepper. Due to his immense cybernetic brain, GorT is able to produce a post in 0.023 seconds and research it in even less time. Only ’Puter spends less time on research. GorT speaks entirely in zeros and ones, but occasionally throws in a ڭ to annoy the Volgi. He is a massive proponent of science, technology, and energy development, and enjoys nothing more than taking the Czar’s more interesting scientific theories, going into the past, publishing them as his own, and then returning to take credit for them. He is the only Gormogon who is capable of doing math. Possessed of incredible strength, he understands the awesome responsibility that follows and only uses it to hurt people.