18
votes
America is running on fumes | In film, science, and the economy, the US has fallen out of love with the hard work of ushering new ideas into the world
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- Title
- America Is Running on Fumes
- Authors
- Derek Thompson
- Published
- Dec 1 2021
- Word count
- 3019 words
America has fallen out of love with the idea of paying people what they're worth, and that's translating to apathy and stagnation.
It seems like only people that manage wealth and write software are treated well.
And even then, they're essentially given golden handcuffs - help your employer profit, don't make too much of a splash, and you'll be taken care of; try to change any aspect of the system and you're out on the street.
Yeah. Even Google employees are getting robbed. They might make $300k/year but generate $2MM in revenue for the company.
They might "make $2MM in revenue" according to some way of looking at it, but still be easily replaced by someone else for $300k.
The $2MM in revenue is a result of the seat they're allowed to occupy, not some magical internal property of their soul.
It turned out the stock options were worth more than the salary, especially if you hold onto them. I don't know if that will last, though.
I consider tax-fed benefits part of the "America paying them" thing. We can do it with good benefits or good salaries. Right now, we have neither.
As someone that worked for a long time in consumer goods, I agree. I do think the problem is a bit more complicated than that.
When a person buys a good, it’s difficult to understand exactly what the exchanged money is going towards, and that leads to a few different problems.
That, paired with the complexity and difficulty of scientific discovery and product development, leads companies to often pick the easier route of putting money into marketing and promotional material, rather than said development.
I’m saying a lot of vague stuff because I’m on mobile over my lunch break. However, I would be happy to go into more detail in my thoughts if there’s interest!
Okay! Apologies for the quite significant delay!
In my eyes, the combination of capital investment and product branding makes the evaluation of a proper price really difficult. For instance, it can take around $1 billion USD to develop a new car model. That’s hundreds of engineers and millions of dollars in prototyping and fixed costs. I’m not specifically in vehicle development, but in similar fields you have two to four full prototype revisions, with anywhere between twenty-five and a few hundred units at each revision. A new model line will often be really expensive, and part of that is offsetting the huge capital investment.
Now, once you have something stable that you like, you can then shift the majority of the engineers to other tasks, making future iterations of the brand a little cheaper to develop. Manufacturers may not sell quite as many of the future iterations, but the cost saved in development will allow for higher profit margins. Also, to try to squeeze out as many iterations on this as possible, you push a much higher percentage of your budget to marketing and brand presence.
For these later iterations, the new models will feature lower-cost brand buzzwords - things that often don’t have much physical cost, but can be a note-worthy selling point. Something like advanced cruise control, or heated seats - comfortable additions that have a tiny cost compared to the development of an entirely new chassis. These can be flashy selling points, but they’re rarely going to be large improvements over the base model. However, people are willing to pay for flashy things. The inflation of a price due to good branding can be successful, because price isn’t a good indicator of cost. At times, it’s even a poor indicator of value, and that can be hard to gauge in the year or so immediately following the release of a product.
Ultimately, I think it’s really tough to spend money in a way that directly supports scientific discovery and product development, because to a company, a branding spend is usually the safer choice. That, and as a consumer, it can be difficult to tell the difference between innovation and good brand management.
Is it really that different than before though? I'm not from the US but from what I've heard, today's Silicon Valley Engineers earn way more than those who founded the Tech companies. Michael Dell literally worked out of his basement before forming Dell company! Same goes for the Hollywood stars too. We had people like Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, etc. who used to contribute heavily to open source while living in minimum wage conditions while people hardly do that today unless it's to polish their own resumes! My own opinion is that today's generation has become more self centered and demanding the moon.
I'm sorry, but your comment is not connected to reality. Wanting to afford rent is not entitled. The average rent in San Francisco is $2,900. If you make 100,000 a year in SF which is about double average annual US wage, you're paying going to pay around 30k in taxes. You would literally pay half your post tax salary into rent. How are people supposed to contribute to open source when they are just trying to survive. So many of the people you mention were only able to create these companies because they had support systems to lean into. You might not be from the US, but here wages have been stagnating for decades. If anything, today's generation is the one that is finally demanding what it deserves.
I think it’s easy to blame Hollywood for being risk averse; while to some extent that’s largely true, people are rewarding their behaviour.
When I look at all the nostalgia-driven burrows I’ve explored in the past two years can I really blame them? In the last two years I can recall doing/playing: BG:EE, BG2:EE, WoW Classic, Skyrim SE, OpenMW, falling back in love with paper MTG, trying my hand at painting 40k again, numerous Xbox backwards compatible titles, Halo MCC, Black Mesa, and probably others I’ve missed. As much as I’d love to try out some new titles I think I’m also part of the problem and I don’t think my situation is very unique either, given how everything is getting remastered these days.