I put this essay up on Medium. I like the concept of Medium. I would like to be able to reach some people who are on the left. Everyone seems to love the juvenile, anti-capitalist rants that people put up. I thought I would put up some different ideas. Based on statistics, hardly anyone who goes to the site seems to want to read what I write. If that continues to be the case, then I will just stick to this blog.
I’ve enjoyed reading your articles for quite some time now. Especially the ones I understand. 🙂
That said, I’m afraid you’re posting to the wrong crowd. Rants that pitch to a knee-jerk emotional appeal are the main driver of content sites that use some form of audience rating system, e.g. Digg, Reddit, Medium, etc.
I like the courtroom analogy. It’s not perfect, but it’s a familiar context for trying to come to an agreement on such a highly subjective topic like “Just”. And it allows for trying to balance those who believe that no profit is just, or at least none beyond a very, very, small amount, and those who believe any and all profits are perfectly Just so long as no laws are broken.
I enjoyed your essay and look forward to the sequels, but I’m not a Medium member so I may not count…
I liked the piece generally, but I feel like it’s mixing up ‘profit’ and ‘compensation’ and ‘capital gain’. It may be true that all of them are somewhat of a mixture of work/effort and luck and scheming/gaming the system.
What a jury might find ‘fair’ is an interesting question… I’m often shocked at some of the amounts awarded by juries in certain high-profile cases.
Medium is, at its core, a social network for longform posts. That means that if you want people to read your stuff there, you need to play to its network effects. Posts go viral by getting “claps” and responses. But to get those, you need followers on Medium clapping for your posts and replying to them. Otherwise, it’s like posting to Twitter when you only have a couple dozen followers and saying that the lack of replies and retweets is because people on Twitter aren’t interested in what you have to say.
There are thriving communities of people on Medium who are very interesting in the kind of things you’re writing. But those people have to find you, which means interacting with them, by clapping for their posts, writing responses, and so on. It’s not an overnight thing.
That said, all that is pretty time consuming. I find Medium enormously valuable and worth the effort, which is why I moved my personal site/blog over there entirely, including using Medium to host my aaronrosspowell.com domain. But that’s a big commitment.
I found Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials by
Malcolm Harris to be useful reading, and it might help you understand where that target audience is coming from. The short version is that they’ve been shaped by intense (to the point of pathology) competition, and offering increased competition as the solution is not going to fly with them.
I wonder if you could find a left wing, blogger with similar volume of readership to you, and swap guest posts with them — they may be just as keen to reach a different audience.
Many on the political right are eager to make their ideas and writing accessible to the left and engage in healthy dialog. That is generally not reciprocated. I wish Kling luck in reaching people on the left, but I’m skeptical of that happening.
The example of a right winger that leftists are willing to listen to is someone like David Frum, who uses his history as a right wing Bush staffer to side with the Democrats on just about every current political issue.
I tried to clap, but evidently I am not approved to clap. Let us know when the other 2 installments post!