Besides what you said, it is also in landlords' interest to maintain (but admittedly with as little cost/involvement as possible) the perception that the real estate goods they're renting are (quality wise) reasonable options for their prospective clients. That means that they (may go to lengths to) fend off troublesome tenants and thus contribute to the overall quality of life for the community in the neighborhood.
What often happens next is, another party comes up in the middle to manage the interaction between both of you (with the proper bump in the ask price), because there's not only so many decision makers looking for neat presentations and whatnot but also there's only so many teams willing to do the actual work.
"It is just about hiding the reality creating vague feeling that people can control things. Even if they cant."
Still, people have agency. If one doesn't see it like that in relation to their material stance then there must be a lot of things that are simply disconsidered from the list of possible options, for whatever reason. Nobody said the world is fine as is and that the blame is somehow all on the ones that are in unsavory positions now. The world is not fine (and never was, for a lot of folks that almost nobody talkes about). It's winter time in this industry and the new hatchlings have their future in question. Yes, there are factors out of their control (like LLMs) that led to this winter, but there's also the colective decision for a lot of kids of pursuing these cushy well-paid office jobs that made things worse by oversaturating the market. Now, of course that, being saddled with student debt and heavily invested by an already acquired degree, to consider the long-term career prospects outside the industry seems like a non-starter, yet it may be exactly what the labor market (and younglings' individual well-being) needs. Such a decision is just of the same kind as the one that brought them here. That's agency on the individual level. And lastly, it's best for everyone to understand, internalize, and accept (the more the better) the fact that nobody else should be expected to step in and fix things for you. Yes, there are many people trying to make the world a better place (as there are many who don't care), there are also people in power that are even supposed to do the same, yet if they manage or not to make it better for you is not a given. That's, whenever it happens, just a bonus. The rest is up to you, the adult.
I wonder if anyone will include the "prompt engineer" in their CV/Resume. Otherwise, if one of the future employers decides to crosscheck a title that's anything different than what your current employer wants to call you, then it may lead to a credibility loss.
Becoming an entrepreneur happens most of the times merely for advancing one's personal financial success. But, another side of it, which doesn't usually get attention, is that you become a beneficial factor for the society at large, because you are assumed to be doing something good and appreciated by others to earn that money. (Otherwise, earning money without being willingly paid, would make you just a criminal). You are right, this "compounds through your life and even more through generations". Especially through generations. This is how the prosperous societies got here - people doing all sorts of things that led to prosperity. If you don't not live in a society like that, then your business should be building a society first. Put your brick in the wall.
It also means that, unless the state of the environment you're in has some "force majeure" as a cause, then the people that were before you haven't done that of a good job building one either. That's not an individual failure, that's generations of failure, don't you think?
And lastly, if the environment you described is the one you're residing in, that means you're far removed from that of the entrepreneur's (you're casting judgement on) and from his/her stance. How can that lead to a caracter judgement worth anything?
"But if they hadn't, I would have a place to sleep and eat."
Forgive me for asking, but (if it's acceptable to reduce it to that) isn't joining the army or something gets one covered? The army service would come with the added bonus of not letting you go soft in perseverance and risk taking areas.
EU countries also have very high tax rates, which feels like the community is the primary beneficiary of your business, not you the entrepreneur. This alone severely reduces the financial incentive of starting a business. There's also some weird cultural stigma in the EU's more socialist countries (like France), where the system is way more comfortable for you as an employee rather than a risk taker. Let's call a spade a spade.
The way you say it, it sounds like the EU shouldn’t have any companies at all, but that is not true. In fact, the EU is very good at boring tech, which is the reason why the US is imposing high tariffs.
It is also that, at 12 years of age, that kid may have had enough of harsh life lessons already, like when he was promised something instead of being rewarded on the spot and later it turned out he was just being tricked. I imagine that something like that may have had a much more direct impact on his OP described decision - that hard earned "street smarts" keeping him grounded in his (undesirable) reality.
I watched a 13-16 year old Lao girl come to that realization in a very upset Facebook story. While I don’t fully understand the context, she was crying and venting that her mother doesn’t love her.
Prior to this fb story, the girl’s mother sold her older 16yo sister to Chinese guy for marriage. And frequently leaves her daughter to sleep on the street, because the girl isn’t able to get home by herself.
Despite all of that, she still felt her mother loved her and just then was when she realized it? I don’t know.
Unfortunately Youre correct, but also it takes years for these kids to process these realities. They’re just isn’t one moment where it’s like “maybe my parents don’t love me” time to change my behavior.
I'd love to share your expressed hope of billionaires' beneficial impact on society, but alas, the behavior that I see in nowadays' crop leaves much to be desired. To be a bit more clear, I don't necessarily see the incentives that drive the wealthy individuals to align with others' hope.
"I'd really like to see examinations of why feudalism seems to be the both the most efficient and most stable social structure in history."
It's the game theory playing on individuals' personal interests. The feudal system is aimed at assuring the status-quo for each participant in the power pyramid. The king relies on the high nobles to keep him and themselves in power, the high nobles rely on lesser nobles in the same way, and so on, everyone having to acknowledge and pledge loyalty/protection to someone else in order to get a modicum of security for their stance. Of course, everyone also has to extract and share resources upward. The collective interest is only secondary and this fact, for better or worse, keeps the life simple and fits the human psychic very well.
However, I do not agree that feudal social order is efficient. The nature of relations between people made things very transactional and specific, which imposed hard limits on the amount and degree of mobilizing and engaging people for pretty much anything.
By "efficient" I mean specifically decision-making efficiency. In a feudal system you do not need to gain consensus from a large number of people, which means that you can adapt to changing conditions faster and gain an edge on the battlefield.
I agree that it has less productive efficiency - democracies usually have stronger economies, often much stronger, than feudal societies. I suspect that this is actually related to the previous point. The increased decision-making efficiency of feudalism comes from a reduced need to get buy-in from people, but if you don't have buy-in from the people doing the work, they will probably half-ass the work. You see this throughout history: the serf works less than the freeholding peasant, the feudal society does not innovate, new inventions get shot down by the social hierarchy, industrialism does not take hold or when it does it's in inefficient top-down forms, etc.
There's still an unresolved contradiction here in that this would imply that feudalism would be more successful in times of quick change, but the historical record is that feudalism becomes very entrenched during times of stasis or decline, but often gets outcompeted in times of rapid growth and innovation. I still have no idea what's up here; perhaps it has to do with the existence of feudal-structure organizations (eg. corporations) within a democratic framework.
reply