It can be a flawed analysis without being propaganda and ignoring societal decline (as the definition of decline and progress itself is debatable).
I do think the fact that humans build up careers and aren't just going to roll over and stop working or switch careers when it would be prudent for society is a good thing to note. Just as career activists move from one cause to another, so too do programmers
This specific article is a propaganda piece, commissioned, paid for, and disseminated by The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.
I won't argue with their right to spread their message, policies, and to engage in marketing exercises, but this is very much their work. As a matter of cold fact, not opinion.
Reading it for me it is clearly propaganda. I didn’t even know it’s link to politics until I read HN comments. The targeted social causes and logic hoop-jumping alone in the article is a pretty obvious sign IMO.
It is true that I don’t this publication. I also don’t know the author or what The Manhattan Institute is. In general unless a piece of text is asking me to take something on faith or I am unable to reason with it I don’t care in the slightest who wrote it, where it was published or what their affiliations are.
> In general unless a piece of text is asking me to take something on faith
The longer I live the more I realize I don't know. For me it means I have to have some trust in the people communicating with me - that they're operating in good faith. More so when their comms are persuasive arguments.
Without my trust + their forthrightness, I have to expend significant time and energy parsing and vetting their statements - for little practical benefit.
