[lbo-talk] free Paris?

Tayssir John Gabbour tayssir.john at googlemail.com
Fri May 11 02:28:11 PDT 2007


On 5/10/07, Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> <<<Sure there is. Drug courts, more money for rehab and education and
> less for jail, and, of course, jobs. There's a gang interventionist
> here in Los Angeles whose mantra is "nothing stops a bullet like a
> job."[WS:] >>>
>
> [WS:] That is way too optimistic - it will take much more than that. It
> takes much more than taking a person out of a ghetto, it takes taking the
> ghetto out of the whole class of people. And that takes much more than
> rehab centers and school funding, and far longer too - two, three
> generations, if not more.

It's interesting to watch discussions between liberals and leftists. There's a large class of liberal arguments which have two points:

* Things are a lot harder than they seem.

* Unintended consequences are pervasive.

However, elites are often told the opposite, in my experience. Much entrepreneurial lit should be in the self-help section: despite failures and naysayers, they preach that You Can Do It!

And their term for "unintended consequences" is probably "risk." Sure, things are risky, and everything you do will contain some surprises. And yet the surprises are often great, to balance off the bad ones. Is certain failure preferable to risk?

So it's completely accepted, for instance, that private venture capital can pour buckets of cash into mostly failures, for a few high-return successes which make the whole thing worthwhile. And many corporate types have the same hypermotivation which door-to-door evangelists share despite day after day of repeated failure.

Some even seem to get off on disproving naysayers, or at least that's the impression they try to create. I guess their logic is that, if you're smarter than "the herd" (most of humanity), there's times when you're going to zig when they zag.

Tayssir



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