<p>Increased market share" doesn’t just invent itself, unless you come up with a creative way of doing X better, targeting Y more crisply, with more precision and efficiency, developing new stories, touching new emotions, communicating better, "</p>
<p>I can think of three kinds of smart people who couldnt do that</p>
<ol>
<li>the number cruncher who cant thing very well about stories and emotions</li>
<li>the socially awkward type who can think those things, but has difficulty communicating it, difficulty understanding the social dynamics of organizing the idea, the team, the selling strategy etc</li>
<li>The idealist who is so questioning and skeptical as to question the very value of touching someones emotions in order to increase market share</li>
</ol>
<p>I have no objection to you doing what you do. I am sure it makes our market system run more smoothly (or disruptively, in a good way, sometimes). What I have trouble with is the notion that because you are good at that, you are ANY better a person, or any more entitled to the fruits of our society, than any of the three types of people I mention. And I dont expect or want our society to stop remunerating people like you more - I just want us to accept that we do it for purely pragmatic reasons, and not because people like you are “better” or “deserving” - so that when we find some way to alter the distribution of the fruits of society in ways that are not unpragmatic, we stop raging against the “unjustice of helping the undeserving” In the society that I live in, the growing inequality of incomes, the increasing concentration of income and wealth in a very small portion of society, is a much bigger status/equality issue of greater importance then, say, the condescension of some asian MIT grad against State school grads. </p>
<p>The defeat of the aristocracy by the plutocracy was heroic and progressive - back in 1790. Barber of Seville and all that. Today the concentrations of wealth and power in the plutocracy is a bigger issue. and the fact that some of the wealthy and powerful are state school grads does not make the result either egalitarian, or genuinely populist. </p>
<p>Now maybe the asian MIT grad dude is not thinking this way - hes want to keep the status quo inequality, he just wants to divide the top slots in ways that work better for him. I will go once again to the history of the American Jews. Lots of folks wanted to simply get the top slots away from the WASPs - they mostly succeeded, either by sheer entrepreneurial gumption, or by waiting a generation or two, and using that time to cultivate the appropriate traits (both the funtional and the incidental ones). SOME of us, an ennobling few IMO, challenged the entire structure of inequality. What I would like to do, is to get some of those asian folks who are fed up, to reframe the way they approach things. To not focus on the details of discrimination for a few top slots, but to challenge the structure of inequality and privilege in our society.</p>