Mark Zuckerberg showed up this year to give the commencement speech at Harvard. Let’s look at parts of the transcript:
graduates of the greatest university in the world
What better proof of the high quality of a university than that the most successful affiliates are those who dropped out? (See also Bill Gates, apparently too busy saving Africans (or “sharing the load” of housekeeping with his wife?) to give this year’s address.) Times Higher Education gives Harvard a solid #6 ranking, behind such schools as Oxford, Stanford, and Cambridge.
my best memory from Harvard was meeting Priscilla. But without Facemash I wouldn’t have met Priscilla, and she’s the most important person in my life
She faces some obstacles to becoming the most important plaintiff in Zuckerberg’s life, though, because the wedding was deferred until a day after the IPO (see “Zuckerberg’s post-IPO wedding is smart legal move” (Reuters) and our chapter on California family law).
Many of our parents had stable jobs throughout their careers. Now we’re all entrepreneurial, whether we’re starting projects or finding or role. And that’s great. Our culture of entrepreneurship is how we create so much progress.
Young people are better and more interesting than their boring parents. The Harvard graduate who goes to work for the government is an “entrepreneur.”
Millennials are already one of the most charitable generations in history. In one year, three of four US millennials made a donation and seven out of ten raised money for charity.
[Entrepreneur notes that “Despite being the largest U.S. demographic by age, the generation of 18-to-34 year-olds donates less and volunteers less for charitable causes than any other age group.” “Why Are Americans Less Charitable Than They Used to Be?” (Atlantic) says “The average American has grown more tight-fisted in recent years, donating a smaller portion of his or her income to charity than he or she did 10 years ago.” (Of course, the authors note that high-income Americans have become less charitable recently, but don’t consider the possibility that this could be due to higher tax rates, such as the Obamacare tax on investment income.)]
giving everyone the freedom to pursue purpose isn’t free. People like me should pay for it. Many of you will do well and you should too.
[… on average not as well as folks who chose to become California prison guards.]
We should have a society that measures progress not just by economic metrics like GDP, but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful.
Maybe Facebook can re-hire Chia Hong to measure the meaningfulness of jobs within the company? (See also “Underpaid and overburdened: the life of a Facebook moderator” (Guardian))
We should explore ideas like universal basic income to give everyone a cushion to try new things. … In a survey asking millennials around the world what defines our identity, the most popular answer wasn’t nationality, religion or ethnicity, it was “citizen of the world”. That’s a big deal. Every generation expands the circle of people we consider “one of us.” For us, it now encompasses the entire world.
UBI will enable everyone to start a company. Certainly no American would use his or her UBI to become an opiate addict, as has been common with SSDI and Medicaid.
[If you’re a citizen of the world and also support universal basic income (UBI), shouldn’t everyone on the planet get a handout? Why does someone who happens to be physically in the U.S. have a greater entitlement than a fellow citizen of the world in Bolivia, India, or China? We take the total wealth we’re going to hand out and divide by 7.5 billion? Or do we exclude citizens of the world who live in the richer-than-the-US countries from joining the check-of-the-month club?]
We’re going to change jobs many times, so we need affordable child care to get to work
Guy with a kid says that people with no kids should work harder and pay higher taxes to subsidize his child care costs.
We get that our greatest opportunities are now global—we can be the generation that ends poverty, that ends disease. … How about curing all diseases and asking volunteers to track their health data and share their genomes? Today we spend 50x more treating people who are sick than we spend finding cures so people don’t get sick in the first place.
There is no way that viruses will turn out to be smarter than humans. Certainly throwing money at a problem will solve it. Maybe a War on Cancer instead of these ongoing battles we’ve been funding?
How about stopping climate change before we destroy the planet
There is no better way to conserve the planet’s resources than tearing down four houses and rebuilding them in the same location.
Readers: What struck you about the dropout’s speech to the graduates?
Related:
These UBI people are delusional about what’s developing in the global economy. The arguments are essentially predicated on ever more automation. The robots will do all the work.
The trend for decades has been less labor in favor of more energy. Amazon is more labor efficient than local retail, but incredibly wasteful of energy. Mega farms that employ very few people but guzzle massive amounts of diesel are the norm now. Exactly the opposite is what’s going to happen going forward. These hyper profitable, low-labor input companies are predicated on abundant cheap energy. Well, that era is drawing to a close. We are out of cheap energy, and affordability will be inexorably declining. More and more people will be directly involved with producing things and moving them around. Sorry, your high profit robot leisure utopia will not be happening. There is no way we can afford something like UBI. People are going to be working harder and harder to collectively maintain a standard of living lower than we have now.
Zuckerberg’s an over privileged elite that’s never worked a day in his life but believes he knows everything and has all the answers. If he really believes the things he says, why doesn’t he start by giving away most of his money and living a middle class life like the vast majority of the people that will be paying for his foolish dreams.
Has he looked at Facebook lately? Better stay in and tend to the business, although he has already assured his own future and it will take a long time for FB to run down. Just look at Yahoo, still killing capital after all these years.
On the UBI, we don’t need a UBI, we need a UBE (Universal Basic Employment). When someone is not employed, the government should find a job for such a person, if the person wants it, with minimal pay, for 6-12 months, till the person finds a real job. Any job will do, such as traffic detail for middle school students that many retiree do for free. Or food delivery for retiree that cannot leave their homes. There are many such works to be had and they don’t have to be 40 hours week job.
One more thing about the UBI. When we file our taxes, we get to deduct “$6,300 for singles and married persons filing separate returns and $12,600 for married couples filing jointly” [1], why not get ride of this deduction and thus EVERYONE gets a UBI?
[1] https://www.irs.gov/uac/newsroom/in-2016-some-tax-benefits-increase-slightly-due-to-inflation-adjustments-others-are-unchanged
I like how Saul Griffith put it in one of his Climate-change presentations
“All human activity is folly”. This includes Zuckerberg’s house and his commencement address. He just knocked out one more item from his bucket list.
Strange isn’t it that people whose skill is to be able to talk to machines in a language called “code” so those machines can figure out how best to sell this or that to people are considered worthy of admiration and emulation.
All these guys are big hypocrites. Do they really believe the BS they spew?
Bill Gates was really hypocritical when he suggested a robot tax. Why didn’t he propose a software tax while he was developing software and replacing many accountants, mathematicians and secretaries with his tools? What’s different?
That’s one of few undesirable but bearable sides of capitalist winner society: unsolicited advise in all aspects of life by people who a great at something specific, like making shoes or crafting well organized social media sites, most of it to cover their behinds form all kind of extortionists and sometimes out of special interest or mental issue. Unlike socialist mandated malady that pushed on people by overwhelming force, it is easily fixable by ignoring it and by having wide range of competing media outlets.