I will confess I was entertained. As an aside this subject seems to parallel in part this subject at The Argument (https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/the-heresy-of-hank-green). [ETA oh and I agree overall, esp. on the closing paragraphs]
An add-on thought (as someone who once was in VC investment, not currently what I do tho), re "The left has always erred by discounting the abilities and importance of entrepreneurs; they imagine that if Jobs and Bezos had never existed, Apple and Amazon would have been built by gray men in flannel suits. They view the techbro class as parasites, draining unearned wealth from organizations that could run themselves just fine on their own." it seems to me there is a strong component in that Lefty-College Degreed class that equally over-indexed on the idea of inventor (particularly solo-inventor) as the "correct" and valid entrepreneur, generally blind or hand-waiving away the execution & engineering that is needed to make IP something actually real-world valuable. Having been on lots of selection committees for venture financing (not in hot-house Cali where crazy bets were (are) made in a lot of copy-catting), execution... As Noah's written, Musk is a nasty horrible person but I've been in enough early stage to know not to abstract away from execution & scaling*
This in my current role in RenEn I see quite a lot in the breathless 'takes' that one 'just' has to deploy X (where X is some latest tech or IP out of a Univ. or similar), completely blind to the engineering and industrial execution that is needed for these things to be truly industrial economical. Engineering and operations is damn hard in esp. physical asset industry.
(* it does remind me of a meeting I attended between a VC and an entrepeneur who didn't want to share his IP for exmaintion on idea it could be easily stolen. VC rightly said "if it's that easy then it's not worth wht you think.")
I will confess I was entertained. As an aside this subject seems to parallel in part this subject at The Argument (https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/the-heresy-of-hank-green). [ETA oh and I agree overall, esp. on the closing paragraphs]
An add-on thought (as someone who once was in VC investment, not currently what I do tho), re "The left has always erred by discounting the abilities and importance of entrepreneurs; they imagine that if Jobs and Bezos had never existed, Apple and Amazon would have been built by gray men in flannel suits. They view the techbro class as parasites, draining unearned wealth from organizations that could run themselves just fine on their own." it seems to me there is a strong component in that Lefty-College Degreed class that equally over-indexed on the idea of inventor (particularly solo-inventor) as the "correct" and valid entrepreneur, generally blind or hand-waiving away the execution & engineering that is needed to make IP something actually real-world valuable. Having been on lots of selection committees for venture financing (not in hot-house Cali where crazy bets were (are) made in a lot of copy-catting), execution... As Noah's written, Musk is a nasty horrible person but I've been in enough early stage to know not to abstract away from execution & scaling*
This in my current role in RenEn I see quite a lot in the breathless 'takes' that one 'just' has to deploy X (where X is some latest tech or IP out of a Univ. or similar), completely blind to the engineering and industrial execution that is needed for these things to be truly industrial economical. Engineering and operations is damn hard in esp. physical asset industry.
(* it does remind me of a meeting I attended between a VC and an entrepeneur who didn't want to share his IP for exmaintion on idea it could be easily stolen. VC rightly said "if it's that easy then it's not worth wht you think.")
FYI, I'm pretty sure Henry was writing about Rob Reich the Stanford political scientist, not Robert Reich the former labor secretary.