- E04 - Leadership! Google, Guido van Rossum, PSF

[Alex Martelli]

Steve Holden <steve at holdenweb.com> wrote:
   ...
> On the available evidence that seems completely untrue. Alex, as I know
> from personal experience, has no problems accepting the material rewards
> of a lifetime spent developing expertise, but that doesn't make him 
> elitist.

I guess what DOES make me an elitist is that I'm perfectly happy to see
greater material rewards go to those who have greater skills or are more
inclined to exert constructive effort.  NOT to the skewed extent one
observes in some countries -- I think countries such as Denmark, Japan,
Sweden, and Belgium, with Gini indices of 25 or less, strike a better
balance than ones such as the UK or Italy, with 36, not to mention the
US's 40 or Brazil's 60 (particularly because it's far from certain, in
high-Gini-index countries, that the "greater material rewards" are
actually mostly flowing to the elite who I think _deserves_ them, the
people who work hard and successfully and thus contribute to everybody's
benefit, as opposed to, people whose only substantial "contribution" has
been to get born in the right family).  But, that's another issue.

> I have seen him helping Python programmers without any monetary 
> reward (and he got precious little for all the time he spent as a 
> technical editor of "Python Web Programming"), 

Actually, I got the enormous pleasure of enjoying your work, and of
helping you (and helping friends is always a joy!) AND the whole
programming community (by helping you enhance a book that was already
good to start with).  _Material_ rewards are not the only ones that
matter, not by a great deal!

> and I know him to be quite far from elitist.

I guess you and I have in mind different meanings for the word
"elitist", because, as above outlined, I do consider myself one.  Even
though I believe in the "wisdom of crowds", I'm definitely anything but
a *populist* -- the "wise crowd", as I see it, is one where each
individual makes up his or her own mind on their own criteria, all
different but all compatible with rationality, as opposed to "following
the herd" or "fashion".


Alex