Paul Graham - stick to writing about technology

I love Paul Graham's writing on Technology but he should stick to that. I love his writing about technology because I feel that he has great insight into the pyschology of programming. For instance, in Hackers and Painters, he argues that hacking (read great programming) is more an art than a science - something that is learnt through practice and by studying the masters.
"The fact that hackers learn to hack by doing it is another sign of how different hacking is from the sciences. Scientists don't learn science by doing it, but by doing labs and problem sets. Scientists start out doing work that's perfect, in the sense that they're just trying to reproduce work someone else has already done for them. Eventually, they get to the point where they can do original work. Whereas hackers, from the start, are doing original work; it's just very bad. So hackers start original, and get good, and scientists start good, and get original."
Writing about why Lisp is so great, Paul compares Lisp's popularity with respect to other languages (read Java) to the popularity of Jane Austen compared to the more commonly read John Grisham! Lisp is indeed difficult to learn as a first language but provides the brevity of expression and richness of metaphor that is unique. Ask any emacs afficionado.

So, why am I disappointed with Paul Graham, in his latest essay writes about Inequality and Risk? If I were to take Graham's conclusions at the end of this essay to their bitter end, I would be led to believe that technology and "progresss" are altars on which every other human endeavour must in the end bow. He argues that societies must reward risk for it is only through risk-taking "startups" that we renew ourselves. The potential reward for the founder of a startup is the possibility of acquiring a huge amount of wealth and that is the motivation for risk taking. If we make the assimilation of wealth not as desirable by very high tax rates, for instance, we would remove that motivation. Therefore, the desire for economic equality in and of itself takes away the entrepreneurial spirit which is so precious. And then, as if to assuage his conscience, Paul Graham goes on to say this:
"We don't need to prevent people from being rich if we can prevent wealth from translating into power."
So, we should be attacking the linkages between wealth and power and not wealth itself.


Graham parrots the very Western capitalistic mantra of competition and risk taking being values to be cherished for a healthy society. His vehicle for realization of the American dream are startups over which he obsesses. And the American dream of wealth is ok as long as it does not lead to corrruption and exploitation of power. Because wealth is only about security according to Graham. Alas, that is just too simplistic reasoning. Wealth allows you to participate in systems that are innately unequal and which foster inequality. Wealth and power are inextricably linked and merely logging transactions will not alter an economic system that rewards capital over labour. I do not believe that technological innovation does not happen in the absence of huge economic rewards. On the contrary, most technological innovators have rarely turned wealthy because of their inventions. Even in the field of computers, examples abound. The elegance of Unix invented in Bell Labs did not lead to much wealth for Messrs. Ritchie, Kernighan etc. Linus, made little from Linux. As for your own favourite - Lisp's inventor John McCarthy despite his right-wing views himself made little money from the idea of Lisp which was conceived in academia and has following mostly in academia. Wealth has usually been obtained, not by technical innovation alone, but by the ability to exploit markets using technology. So, I am not so worried about technical innovation dying because there is no wealth incentive. As long as there continue to remain institutions where the pursuit of knowledge and the respect of peers ranks above accumulation of wealth, there will be innovation. And with the equalizing effect of the internet, such institutions have only proliferated.

I have another objection to Graham's essay - of placing technological growth as a desirable in and of itself. As a race, we have constantly struggled in our sociological and psychological frameworks to keep pace with technology. This has increased in the last hundred years. We also struggle to keep pace with our moral and ethical compasses to deal with issues such as privacy that are under constant threat from technological progress. Without sounding too much like a Luddite (and that would be too hypocritcal considering that I earn my bread through technology), I think that it is time that we put some other things above technological progress. That we had more debates in every sphere about the ethical implications of RFID or of genetic engineering without relegating and labeling all such arguments as nihilistic or anti-development. Bill Joy's (cofounder of Sun) article in Wired (August 2000) - "Why the future doesn't need us" is worth reading as an alternative view point of another technologist.