MoneyIsLikeGravity

Quora Answer : What is it that makes liberals less competent in almost everything they engage in?

Feb 9, 2017

I don't agree with the premise of your question. But I'll tell you a story that I think speaks to the intuition behind it.

I worked at a number of startups with young, passionate, idealistic people. People I admired and cared for.

And often it sucked and I was unhappy.

Because we didn't handle disagreement well. We all wanted what we thought was best. And when we disagreed, having nice people who disagreed with us, made us unhappy and people left.

OTOH, I also worked at a small company that said it was a cool and agile startup, but was actually run by old-school retirees from large corporations who practised a kind of "management by shouting at people". They had no understanding of the technology. No understanding of the customer's needs. This company was riven by factionalism. People HATED each other. Hated the colleagues they were meant to be working with. Had little respect for management. And hilariously catastrophic crises blew up frequently. People were sacked arbitrarily for supporting the wrong faction. Our code-base (inherited from another company) was horrible. We frequently ran out of money and had to go cap-in-hand to new investors. And we were on a Death March where the product advanced incredibly slowly, partly because different parts of the company were pulling different directions ... management didn't want to make the product that the existing customers wanted and thought they were getting.

So here's the thing. I was often stressed, often pissed off, often tired and overworked. But I was never unhappy at this company the way I was in the others. And everyone just kept on grinding, day in, day out, the product (slowly) got better, eventually the customers got (more of) what they wanted.

What's the difference?

Well, at this last company, no-one was under any illusions, we weren't on a mission, didn't believe we were there to enjoy ourselves or save the world. We weren't self-actualizing. We were just there for the monthly paycheck. We didn't have to like our colleagues or the job. (Now don't get me wrong, I liked plenty of my colleagues too ... some I still hang out with ... but we didn't have to pretend this was more than a job.) Also, things were so fucked in general, almost everything I did was a positive. In the cooler companies I often worried that I was letting my friends or the mission down when I couldn't find or fix what seemed like a trivial bug for a week. I felt bad about myself for being stupid (or lazily going and surfing the internet). In this one it didn't much matter, I was advancing at the same glacial pace as everything else.

Guess which company had the biggest revenue (not necessarily profit). Guess which was actually getting most (very institutional) users. And which was doing more "work".

Tortoise beats the hare.

It's a beautiful idea for people to unite around ideals. But when those ideals become differences, then it's hard to heal and find compromise. I sometimes say that money is like gravity compared to electromagnetic and nuclear forces. Far weaker as a motivator of action, but it works over much longer distances and time-scales. An institution that has nothing much going for it than a continuous flow of money can be pretty stable and sustainable in the long run, barring dramatic perturbations.

THAT is why conservative institutions can get stuff done, when so many liberal idealistic institutions : movements, voluntary projects, cool non-profit startups, flare and burn.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying money is "better" than idealism. It's not more "virtuous" and doesn't necessarily make better decisions or pursue more worthy aims. Mostly it makes terrible decisions and pursues horrible objectives. But it does have a kind of momentum and stability that gets what it wants done.