on the contrary, these are rather linked: in your hypothetical scenario, Jobs is able to solve his problem (and not have to worry about fixing dinner) because he can rely on someone else to bring it to him. Of course there is the I, Pencil understanding of this--which is a good start, but which fails to recognize the variety of public inputs to the process that aren't just about self interested Randian entrepreneurs.
The fact is that you can't really separate the "actual" and "proximate" causes in this scenario. The only way that Jobs is able to concentrate on being some isolated, driven genius is that there is an entire social system creating all the other inputs he needs to be productive. Sure there are more or less, Jobs... - attended public schools - likely hired people who attended public schools - created arrangements early on to sell Apple computers to public schools - worked in an industry, as Doug Henwood (and countless others on the LBO list) pointed out, that was initiated almost entirely out of defense department and/or public university research. - Benefited from government policies that favored China as a trading partner starting in the early 2000s - and benefited from the low income, high tension workplaces that these trading arrangements have helped create (not so much a subsidy as the state setting up a favorable structure for business.) - very likely benefited from the kinds of pure science inputs of public research, as our very own Perelman documents in "steal this idea." - benefited from a variety of crowdsourced/open source inventions like the visual browser, etc. - built social marketing into the iPod development, for instance by making the white ear buds a signal of the iPod, a fashion accessory, and therefore turned every iPod user (or wannabe ear bud wearer) into a billboard for the product. -benefited from the quiescence of leftist politics which allowed for cheap credit and a culture of debt to cushion the silent redistribution of wealth upward in a historic reversal of the post war policies of progressive taxation - etc. Besides the point in the passage below is not just that there are a variety of inputs. It is that the very concept of the individual is only possible in society. While at the margins there may be these kinds of Randian superheroes, even their success is largely a result of the social resources they were able to exploit. In any event, the libertarian fundamentalism in your lreply is clearly motivated by current circumstances. And on this topic, there is no evidence that Jobs would have been any less likely to do any of this if his marginal tax rate last week were the same as when he began his journey as an entrepreneur. The last twenty years have been exceptionally good for people like Jobs, but the median household has had it pretty rotten. As the EPI has shown, ALL of the growth in income (and it has been a pitiful amount of growth compared to the post-war average) has gone to the top 10%, over 50% of it to the top 1%. Whatever you think about this philosophically, it is obviously unsustainable economically. In this, it doesn't actually matter what "marxist/leninists" believe: it is an animosity borne of the penury of the mass of Americans. Just sift through the stories on this blog and tell me how many potential Steve Jobs are now languishing in near poverty http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/ Is it simply that they are not worthy of life, that they haven't struggled enough or overcome enough? Do you really believe that students leaving college this year have the same kind of job opportunities (particularly relative to the debt they have accrued, due largely to the disproportionate growth of tuition costs and the cutting of public expenditures on higher education) as students leaving school ten or twenty years ago? s On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 11:43, David Shemano <[email protected]> wrote: > Responding to Sean Andrews: > > This is a red herring. The issue is not whether Jobs creates wealth by > himself or outside of a network of social relations. No one disputes that > that an Apple product, like a pencil, is the product of widely dispersed > knowledge contributed by a multitude over generations, and the product would > not exist without the contribution of each. Instead, the issue is the > difference between what lawyers call "actual cause" (i.e., but-for causation) > and "proximate cause." The fact that a software engineer working late one > night to solve a key problem and a pizza deliveryman who delivered a pizza to > the engineer that night might both be "actual causes" of the final product > does not mean that the contributions are in any way meaningfully comparable, > so we can say that the engineer's contribution was a "proximate cause" of the > product while the pizza delivery was not a proximate cause. In this sense, > when we search for the primary "proximate causes" of Apple products, Jobs > stands far above the rest, because (1) as a matter of historic judgment, his > contributions were relatively greater and more important than the > contributions of others, and (2) Jobs, the individual person, was unique and > irreplaceable, while all other contributors, as individual persons, including > Wozniak, would have been replaceable. > > David Shemano > > "The more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and > hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a > greater whole: in a still quite natural way in the family and in the family > expanded into the clan [Stamm]; then later in the various forms of communal > society arising out of the antitheses and fusions of the clan. Only in the > eighteenth century, in ‘civil society’, do the various forms of social > connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private > purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this > standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the > hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations. The > human being is in the most literal sense a Zwon politikon[3] not merely a > gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the > midst of society. Production by an isolated individual outside society – a > rare exception which may well occur when a civilized person in whom the > social forces are already dynamically present is cast by accident into the > wilderness – is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language > without individuals living together and talking to each other. There is no > point in dwelling on this any longer. The point could go entirely unmentioned > if this twaddle, which had sense and reason for the eighteenth-century > characters, had not been earnestly pulled back into the centre of the most > modern economics..." > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
