I had a fascinating conversation last Thursday with Lance Walley (of Engine Yard) regarding life, religion, economics and building businesses. There were so many gems that came out of the conversation that I’m afraid this post may be a little haphazard. In any case, I was pleased to finally meet him and to have a night on the town here in Chicago.

On economics, Lance mentioned a friend who had lived in Finland for a while. This friend observed that the people there were generally happy, but the interesting thing is that they’ve essentially “squelched” the amplitude of their economy—there are fewer really poor people, and fewer really rich people. The middle “band” of the economic wave is the place of the majority. Here in America, on the other hand, the capitalist economy is a little different. People have the potential for greater wealth as well as greater disaster and poverty.

We talked about the advantages of capitalism, especially in the context of a book called The Commanding Heights by Daniel Yergen. From what I understood, Yergen makes a convincing case for capitalism by observing the many economic systems throughout the world and through time. I brought up the point that capitalism does not work in the context of families, however. That may be somewhat absurd (applying capitalism within a family structure), but the absurdity just shows how at some level of the social structure, capitalism loses touch with humanity. So we have competing ideologies that want more or less social responsibility and redistribution of wealth.

On another subject, Lance mentioned a book that I will definitely have to get my hands on, called “The Singularity is Near”. Apparently it’s quite popular, even though I hadn’t heard of it (but when did my having heard about it ever mean anything? ) The premise of the book is the the pace of progress is itself progressing, and that at some point in the near future, something that we humans create (e.g. self-replicating artificial intelligence) will be born and it will forever change the trajectory of our evolution and our planet.

We also had a chance to talk about EngineYard and the cool things going on there. Rubinius, Merb and a full stack hosted Rails solution are all enticing projects. They’re on the edge, pushing the technology forward and for that I applaud their willingness to take risks, as well as their vision for the future.