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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 4 Aug 2019
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      If you try to derive a sound view on healthcare, military adventures, or climate action from whether you love or hate billionaires or movie stars, you will end up with ridiculous cartoon views because these problems are fundamentally not even about wealth/success.

      1 reply 5 retweets 55 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 4 Aug 2019
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      Note that obsessive focus on wealth/success is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. More individuals will be wealthy and/or successful as a fraction of the population and the society in aggregate will also be more wealthy and successful. But median is not the same as maximum.

      1 reply 2 retweets 26 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 4 Aug 2019
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      You’ll have more billionaires and rockstars per capital and higher GDP and growth perhaps. But you’ll also be more cruel to your poor, sick, dying than societies with less individual/collective wealth/success. You’ll have bigger social costs, snowballing faster.

      3 replies 3 retweets 56 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 4 Aug 2019
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      You will de facto criminalize lack of success or wealth. Your ability to solve for anything else (wisdom, compassion) will atrophy, because those are skills too. Privilege literally means private law. That will become the only kind of law. Public law will become prison yard law.

      1 reply 4 retweets 67 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 4 Aug 2019
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      Solving for wealth/success will look like breaking out of prison. If you’re not born to privilege, you’ll be born into increasingly prison-like situations, designed to contain, coerce, punish, tame. What I call breaking smart in more optimistic writing will become breaking out.

      3 replies 4 retweets 58 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 4 Aug 2019
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      All countries have their share of transient problems, acute crises, chronic structural problems, and existential paradoxes. But the US probably has the most severe collective mental health problem among countries I think I grok. And the root cause is a wealth/success monoculture.

      3 replies 9 retweets 77 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 4 Aug 2019
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      All this just makes me sad. The hard part is that America is highly attached to its wealth/success orientation as both a great national strength and the root of its exceptionalism narrative. It is hard to accept that your greatest strength can also be your greatest weakness.

      2 replies 5 retweets 73 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 4 Aug 2019
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      Arrested development is *always* rooted in a sense of one’s strength. It is hard to move past this condition because it’s hard to notice when a strength stops being a strength and turns into a limiting self-perception. I have no suggestions. America will either grow or die.

      4 replies 7 retweets 60 likes
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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 4 Aug 2019
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      Btw, inequality, wealth concentration, cronyism, financialization of everything: all these are not “problems”. The are natural consequences of W/S values and enjoy basic moral sanction. If wealth+success = good, anything that favors it can at worst be inefficient, not bad.

      1 reply 1 retweet 44 likes
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    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 4 Aug 2019
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      The “problem” America has with these things is that they let “undeserving” people get wealthy and successful, and prevent greater peaks being reached by bigger Big Men, not because they make the poor more miserable or prisons more terrible.

      2 replies 0 retweets 25 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 4 Aug 2019
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      America has more compassion for Bezos being harassed by Trump than people scammed by Trump University. More compassion for a well-funded startup being blocked from a market by a protectionist crony sector than people being actively hurt by the social costs of that sector.

      10:55 AM - 4 Aug 2019
      • 9 Retweets
      • 87 Likes
      • Cokefetus Joni Lindström Gorys Siborutorop Warren Koch madFrog Kerry Drake E. (he/him) against utopia 🏴🟢 Soulsweller
      3 replies 9 retweets 87 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. The Circular Ruins‏ @Circular_Ruins 4 Aug 2019
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          Replying to @vgr

          @threadreaderapp unroll, please

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
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        1. Maynard Handley‏ @handleym99 4 Aug 2019
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          Replying to @vgr

          "America"? Or the part of America that you communicate/interact with (ie Twitter+MSM)?

          0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
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        1. Erik Thomson‏ @ErikThomson7 4 Aug 2019
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          Replying to @vgr

          Thanks for a thoughtful series of posts.

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