How Power Actually Works

Discussions

• Did calling half the country 'deplorables' cost the Democrats their party?

  In September 2016, Hillary Clinton said that roughly half of Donald Trump's supporters belonged in a "basket of deplorables": racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic... . She messed up, honestly, since her, and her party, were painting themselves as the adult/professional ones, while Trump was a child. Well, Trump won. But...

• History targeted Catholics and the Irish first, so will your turn come too?

  In the 1850s, the dominant nativist movement in the United States was organized around anti-Catholic and anti-Irish hostility. The Know-Nothings argued that Catholic immigrants were culturally unfit for republican self-government , loyal to a foreign power (the Pope), and incapable of genuine American citizenship. By the 1880s, the same suspicion had moved heavily onto Chinese immigrants. By the 1920s, it had moved again toward southern and eastern Europeans, especially Jews and...

• Did Nietzsche make destruction look wiser than it actually is?

  It is easy to sound intelligent by pointing out cracks. It is much harder to give people somewhere better to live. Modern culture keeps confusing demolition with depth, and Nietzsche helped make that confusion look glamorous.

• Were people really any dumber in the past?

  There is a habit in modern thinking that treats the past as a kind of half-awake state, as if the Age of Enlightenment woke us up. People imagine ancient societies as crowded with superstition, as if belief itself was less disciplined before modern science arrived to rescue it. It is a comforting story because it makes the present feel like an intellectual peak rather than just another arrangement of limits and assumptions.

• Does stack ranking turn coworkers into enemies?

  Stack ranking always ends in politics because it changes what competence means inside an organization. Once employees are judged relative to each other instead of against a stable standard or objective, your smartest coworker stops being an asset that you can learn from and collaborate with, and starts becoming competition. Their success can lower your standing. Their visibility can cost you promotion space. Their expertise becomes a threat to your own security.

• Should politicians actually get paid more?

  People like the idea of cheap politics because it feels morally clean. If politicians are underpaid, the thinking goes, they must be serving for noble reasons. If the salary is modest, corruption must have less room to grow. It is an attractive fantasy and a bad way to design a state. In fact, is an elitist way and it leads to government by the rich, who can afford it.

• Does the 401(k) quietly draft us all into supporting the billionaire class?

  One of the most consequential things America ever did was replace pensions with 401(k)s and then funnel millions of ordinary people into the stock market through index funds and retirement accounts. Not because it turned most Americans into capital owners in any sense. Stock ownership is still overwhelmingly concentrated at the top 0.1%. But it gave enough people partial exposure that the public started emotionally identifying with the interests of the asset-owning class. That changed the…

• Is there any conservative ideology left to recognize in the Republican party?

  I used to think I understood what I was part of. Not in a blind, devotional way, but in the sense that there was a rough consistency to it. Free markets, free trade, small government. Respect for institutions, personal responsibility, suspicion of concentrated power, especially when it showed up in Washington. Remember that? You didn’t have to agree with every position, but you could at least recognize the shape of the ideology.

• Do billionaires want more money, or a bigger share of the whole economy?

  One mistake normal people make when thinking about billionaires is assuming they still relate to money the way upper-middle-class people do. They do not. For a household making $90k, another $50k changes life materially. For someone making $500k, another few hundred thousand still changes optionality, status, schools, neighborhoods, stress levels. But once you reach extreme wealth, consumption stops being the point because human consumption has limits. There's only so much you can buy and you…

• Is it execution, not innovation, that actually makes companies succeed?

  One thing that starts looking fake after enough years in tech is the obsession with “disruption” as the explanation for every successful company. The winning company simply executed better than everyone else in a market that already existed. Facebook was not some impossible conceptual breakthrough. Social networking already existed. MySpace existed. Friendster existed and the majority of features Facebook had were present in these 2. People already understood the product category immediately.…

• Do rich people really take the same risks the rest of us have to?

  Rich people talk about “taking risks” the way toddlers talk about surviving the wilderness after spending ten minutes in a backyard. Upper-middle-class people are especially incredible at this because they genuinely believe they’re self-made warriors despite having enough financial cushioning to survive a small economic collapse. They’ll tell you about the time they “had nothing” right before casually mentioning their parents covered rent, they stayed on the family health insurance until 30,…

• If you're not a billionaire, why do you vote like one?

  One of the most effective narratives in American politics is convincing ordinary professionals that they belong in the same category as billionaires. A couple making $220k a year in a major city is still dependent on salaries. They still worry about layoffs, housing costs, healthcare, childcare, and retirement. They cannot buy political influence. They cannot move markets. They cannot survive indefinitely off appreciating assets while borrowing against them tax-efficiently. They are not living…