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Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

spicyusername
200 replies
1d5h

I very much agree with the premise that economists unduly focus on a few metrics of dubious quality - labor force participation, personal consumption expenditures, market capitalization, wage growth, etc - and overfit them to construct a coherent narrative about the "strength" of the economy and what the experience of living in that economy must be like.

There's a story right now being peddled by all the talking heads that the economy is "great", but consumers keep reporting feeling terrible, so consumers must not understand something.

I think this goes the other way around. Our method for understanding the economy is flawed and is not properly capturing what all consumers know intuitively, things kind of suck, even when you have a job and even when you're still buying things.

We need to start thinking about what information needs to be captured and how it needs to be reported to start making better sense of what's broken and how to fix it.

Spooky23
52 replies
1d3h

There are two Americas, the one that HN folks inhabit and the underclass.

The former is doing great.

The latter has grown and shifted. I grew up in a rural community that was in the process of unraveling from a prosperous farming and light industrial area to a rural slum. There are zero operational farms in that area today. The one I worked for as a teen was in continuous operation since the Dutch colonial period.

That’s an example of why the nihilism of MAGA is so appealing. The world is collapsing around many people.

These issues are caused by demographics and macro trends. The laws have changed to facilitate generational wealth transfer, and that process will change the way the economy works and further fuel unrest. This stuff is unlikely to get fixed in my lifetime.

apsec112
20 replies
1d3h

Since 2016, real (inflation-adjusted) wages have risen quickly for people in the bottom quartile, while for upper-income workers they've been stagnant. Obviously, most people on HN are still better off than manual laborers, but the gap has narrowed substantially (a big reversal from 1995-2015) and that's a good thing.

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...

netbioserror
5 replies
1d2h

Way to completely miss the anecdotal point about rural cultural decay. You can point to a chart showing rising wage growth all day, but if it's happening at the expense of long-lived communities being hollowed out, you're effectively celebrating peoples' destitution.

It is incredible how Internet armchair technocrats will attempt to reduce human existence to a few equations and wonder why broader populations despise the Ivory Tower.

rangestransform
4 replies
1d

Rural existence is already subsidized by urban dwellers, I dunno what more they expect

vagrantJin
1 replies
23h5m

Please elaborate further on what you mean by the phrasing of "Rural existence is already subsidized...."

I'm uncertain if I missed the sarcasm or perhaps more likely my lack of comprehension.

netbioserror
0 replies
22h37m

Inept thinkers really have a way of making themselves obvious.

berniedurfee
0 replies
22h18m

Wow, I’ve never heard this sort of urban elitism before! Is it common?

boppo1
2 replies
1d

real (inflation-adjusted) wages

lol.

The whole point of this discussion is that our metrics are not properly measuring things. The reported inflation number is a joke. See: anything in life that matters like - a house - a car - an education - health care - raising a kid - basically any life-milestone

but TVs and electronic toys have never been cheaper so it's all okay! Hedonic adjustment!

prisenco
1 replies
23h58m

| an education

The community college in the area I briefly lived growing up was $17 a credit hour in 1997. Inflation adjusted that's $31.67 a credit hour.

It's now nearly $140 a credit hour. Almost 4.5x more than inflation.

For a community college.

lotsoweiners
0 replies
21h42m

Probably considerably cheaper than the University and you can always transfer after 2 years.

Spooky23
2 replies
1d2h

Wages are tough in this segment because many households are dependent on external non-income benefits. Particularly Medicaid and particularly for children.

So if your $16/hr job pops by 30%, the net impact on the household is much lower in many cases. For teen workers, it’s beer money. For single moms, it’s a net loss as costs for daycare and healthcare have increased 50%.

All of this stuff is relative. I’m a tech exec in a large organization, and essentially live the same lifestyle as my parents, who were in “lower end” jobs relatively speaking in the 80s when I was little.

ebiester
1 replies
1d

This seems weird to me. What is your savings rate versus theirs? I say this because on the surface, the same feels true for me, but on closer inspection I spend money like water in ways they had tightly controlled. And yet, I have a higher savings rate than they did.

(However, I don't have a pension.)

Spooky23
0 replies
2h19m

Probably similar, I’m an aggressive saver.

The biggest difference is housing and healthcare. My healthcare expense is equivalent to their mortgage. My dad family healthcare coverage was $0 until I was in high school. The total cost of my, excellent health insurance is about $35k, which is 90% of the salary of my first professional job in 1999!

Our policy with respect to healthcare is essentially a regressive tax on the working public. Rich people have a limited cost exposure, poor people get limited access to poor care, and everyone else gets increasingly expensive, lower quality care.

marginalia_nu
1 replies
1d2h

I don't know if it's being done as a joke or what, but this is the exact sort of myopic focus on a single economic variable that is being criticized as failing to capture economic reality.

johnnyanmac
0 replies
21h13m

Yeah, we should be comparing spending power as a very slight upgrade to the metric of overall compensation.

And I'm not even sure what this graph is supposed to be showing. The biggest difference is when he 1st quartile stagnates while the 4th quartile loses 4-5%. 95% of $200,000 is still a lot more than even a 100% increase in salary for $40,000. my most generous, lazy interpretation of this chart shows a whopping $15% increase in wages for the first quartile.

Der_Einzige
1 replies
1d2h

I keep telling everyone I know about this and literally zero people believe me!

So done with Americans finally getting into boom times and still feeling like it’s 2008. No one here ever wants to admit that they have it good.

uoaei
0 replies
1d2h

You are literally the person the article is about.

yoyohello13
0 replies
1h29m

I'm sure those rural workers watching their towns disintegrate around them will be happy to know they are at least making a extra couple bucks an hour.

tarsinge
0 replies
23h24m

The global inflation is exactly the kind of insufficient metric the parent is talking about. What about salaries compared to necessities like food and shelter? Global inflation is only meaningful for upper income workers that have significant disposable income.

pessimizer
0 replies
1d1h

This is a bad interpretation of events, and an intentional ignoring of wealth gains.

Since 2016, real (inflation-adjusted) wages have risen quickly for people in the bottom quartile

This "quick" wage growth, as you point out with your image, is on the order of 1 or 2% for the past few years, and was massacred by recent inflation i.e. if raising the minimum wage raised your standard of living, you've almost exactly kept up with inflation.

Meanwhile, wealth amongst people who hold investments, a group that often includes upper-income workers, has massively increased during that time. The S&P has had a 130% adjusted return since 2016. The share of wealth held by the top 10% is as high or higher than it was in 2016.

lupire
0 replies
1d3h

That graph shows beginning of a recovery from large wage decreased of the last few years. Equality is nice, but the main story is that everyone is doing worse.

ryandrake
14 replies
1d1h

That’s an example of why the nihilism of MAGA is so appealing. The world is collapsing around many people.

And this is what I don't get about current US politics. MAGA = Republicans. The Republican party is the party of generational wealth transfer. The Republican party is the party of elite businessmen lording over the working class. The Republican party is the party of all the economic forces that are unraveling rural communities and turning them into slums. They're voting for and supporting the very politicians who are "collapsing the world" around themselves. But why? It's not just idle nihilism. They're one of the most actively engaged political demographics in recent memory. Is the Culture War so important/motivating to these people that they are willing to help implement their own economic destruction?

pessimizer
10 replies
1d1h

You shouldn't confuse your stereotypes of people for actual people.

The Republican party is the party of generational wealth transfer.

I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. The Republican party is half the country.

"Demographic data compiled in the 2016 and 2020 elections showed that the top 40 percent of income earners preferred the Democratic candidate for president (Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden) over the Republican (Donald Trump), signifying a sizable coalition shift from where the party was in the previous decade."

https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-being-party-rich-could-co...

"Some recent US figures on the distribution of income by party: 65 percent of taxpayer households that earn more than $500,000 per year are now in Democratic districts; 74 percent of the households in Republican districts earn less than $100,00 per year. Add to this what we knew already, namely that the 10 richest congressional districts in the country all have Democratic representatives in Congress. The above numbers incidentally come from the Internal Revenue Service, via Bloomberg, and are likely to be more reliable than if they came from Project Veritas via theblaze.com."

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/democrats-rich-par...

The Republican party is the party of all the economic forces that are unraveling rural communities and turning them into slums.

All of them?

"For decades, the Republicans were seen as the party of big business. Their support for low taxes and light regulation was manna to executives eager to raise profits and avoid government entanglements, and chief executives and big companies were reliable funders of Republicans up and down the ballot.

"Mr. Trump has frayed those bonds. Four years ago, few major chief executives supported Mr. Trump during his first campaign. And throughout his time in the White House, executives from many of the company’s biggest brands publicly sparred with the president on everything from gun control to climate change to immigration.

"'I can’t remember a time when the business community has spoken out so strongly in opposition to an administration on so many important issues,' said Rich Lesser, chief executive of Boston Consulting Group."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/business/republicans-busi...

Is the Culture War so important/motivating to these people that they are willing to help implement their own economic destruction?

This is the culture war. You're doing it right now.

mptest
9 replies
23h46m

> The Republican party is the party of generational wealth transfer.

I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean.

They oppose estate or "death" taxes in general. That is what they mean.

The Republican party is half the country.

They're half of voters. They haven't won the popular vote in how many years? 40? They're an obnoxiously loud minority.

All of them?

Probably not all, but nearly all. The maga tariffs and then subsequent bailouts of farmers harmed comes to mind. reagan's austerity is another easy example.

>Is the Culture War so important/motivating to these people that they are willing to help implement their own economic destruction? This is the culture war.

You're doing it right now.

No, they aren't. The republicans bemoaning the 1% of people who identify as trans to distract their uneducated voters while banning books and attacking public education funding, libraries, women's rights, etc, are.

Don't fall in to the bothersider ism trap. Look at republican policy in a red state like texas[0] to see why the comment you replied to is the truth.

[0] https://www.chron.com/politics/article/texas-gop-2024-priori...

bequanna
8 replies
22h31m

The estate tax doesn’t mean too much.

“Generational wealth” is generally a myth. The second and third generations burn through any inheritance and sprint back to middle class rather quickly.

gwd
7 replies
22h16m

“Generational wealth” is generally a myth. The second and third generations burn through any inheritance and sprint back to middle class rather quickly.

Ref? That was definitely not my impression from listening to "Capital in the 21st Century".

bequanna
6 replies
21h52m

Piketty is not my favorite. I consider him a pure academic who tends to cherry pick data.

In reality, wealth tends to cluster around people who are good stewards of it. They allocate capital efficiently and we are all better off.

The government is NOT a good steward of wealth. They allocate inefficiently (because no accountability) so we should minimize what we give them.

Here is a quick and dirty reference discussing how lazy kids of rich people blow it: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/generational-wealth-curse-cau...

elliotto
3 replies
19h35m

This is wild to disagree with Pikettys magnum opus with a reference to a yahoo finance news article

bequanna
2 replies
18h46m

The dude is a pure academic and just trying to sell socialism with hand waving.

I look at it differently: His ideas are so weak and removed from reality that they can’t even stand up to a Yahoo Finance article.

We should be careful taking policy advice from people who have never had real jobs.

mptest
0 replies
18h17m

So teaching isn't a real job? Authoring books isn't a real job? Someone should probably tell a lot of people the bad news...

selling socialism with hand waving

Lol, more like selling it with award winning, best selling, taught in colleges books? If you're convinced that's "hand waving" you're beyond lost

elliotto
0 replies
12h18m

uhh not sure what constitues a real job if not an author, consultant and teacher (on top of being a successful academic). Have you read his book? It's quite good.

gwd
0 replies
9h45m

The government is NOT a good steward of wealth. They allocate inefficiently (because no accountability) so we should minimize what we give them.

Have you ever actually looked at how large companies allocate wealth, and how much actual accountability there is there? I can't tell you how many billions of dollars the company I currently work for burned with acquisitions whose products they shut down and teams they laid off two years later; and they're definitely not worse than normal, as far as I can tell. How many products has Microsoft attempted and then killed? How big is the Killed By Google graveyard? And in many cases people who make catastrophic decisions are rewarded -- "failing up" with golden parachutes and higher more influential posts.

In my experience, people who say things like this have a double standard. If you judge the government and corporations by the same standards, they come out about the same -- a bit of really good, a bit of really bad, lots of mediocre. The difference is that the government is at least nominally trying to work for the voters, whereas corporations are explicitly only working for their shareholders.

gwd
0 replies
9h30m

Here is a quick and dirty reference discussing how lazy kids of rich people blow it:

The only evidence presented is assertions by companies selling wealth management services:

"The “third generation curse” indicates that 90% of wealthy families are likely to lose their [money](404 ERROR) by the third generation, according to AMG National."

The only link to further evidence results in a 404; and the only advice is, "Train your kids not to be stupid", and "Use one of these wealth management services".

I think I'd actually seen that exact article before I listened to Piketty's book; but Pikkety actually provides evidence across many different countries, sometimes going back to the 1700s. Absent other evidence (which again you simply assert without giving a reference to), I'd trust an academic more than a company who has a vested interest in drumming up business by scaring people.

ETA: Even supposing we take the article at face value (which I definitely have doubts about), it makes two claims:

1. Of "wealthy" families, 90% will lose it within 3 generations

2. This can be prevented if children are taught money management skills growing up

Even supposing those are true it doesn't support the statement that "generational wealth is generally a myth".

Why? Because % families != % wealth. It's perfectly possible that 10% of wealthy families who consistently teach good money management to their children control 90% of the wealth.

Spooky23
1 replies
18h16m

MAGA or “conservatives” is different than republicans.

MAGA is a populist movement of nihilists being used by those money people. Problem is none of their problems are being addressed. Jesus, guns, and persecution of various straw men will run out of steam, and the angry populist energy will transition to real unrest.

ryandrake
0 replies
3h34m

MAGA or “conservatives” is different than republicans.

This thread is dead at this point but I just wanted to point out that you can't really separate them anymore. They have nominated a MAGA candidate for the top office in the country, three times in a row. The vast majority of their electorate will vote for the MAGA candidate. The party -is- MAGA for all practical discussion.

ncallaway
0 replies
1d1h

The people implementing the economic destruction are promising a silver bullet to instantly fix everything.

The people who promise modest, incremental improvement are much less appealing in that environment.

nequo
11 replies
1d2h

There are two Americas, the one that HN folks inhabit and the underclass.

The former is doing great.

This is at odds with what I've been hearing on HN and in adjacent places. For a year or two now, people have been saying that finding a job in tech has become much harder. Some say that it hasn't been this bad in a decade. Some say it hasn't been this bad since the dotcom bubble burst.

jurassic
3 replies
1d2h

A small percent of tech workers struggling to get a job doesn’t change the overall picture that most people working in tech are living relatively prosperous and comfortable lives. We are paid at a level that means we don’t feel stressed at the grocery store figuring out how to feed our kids or wonder how will we get to work when our cars break down. And as a bonus, we get to sit comfortably in air-conditioned rooms and spend a good chunk of our day thinking about things we actually take some enjoyment from.

None of this is true for the “underclass” mentioned above who have little to look forward to each day; the labor they provide is in various amounts boring/tedious/demeaning/physical, and doesn’t pay enough to give them the middle class lifestyle they feel entitled to (e.g. home ownership, healthcare, etc).

I and many people I know have gone through job searches over the last 18 months. Yes, it was more work than we’ve come to expect over the last 10 years. But ultimately everyone I know has landed on their feet. As an industry we are still incredibly privileged compared to most.

johnnyanmac
2 replies
21h6m

I and many people I know have gone through job searches over the last 18 months. Yes, it was more work than we’ve come to expect over the last 10 years. But ultimately everyone I know has landed on their feet. As an industry we are still incredibly privileged compared to most.

it's 50/50 in my circle. And I got the losing coin toss. Pretty much everyone in my circle got at least a threat of a lay off at some point except one person (and that company is in a very special situation). some got jobs quickly, to various levels of satisfaction. Some got laid off and then went back to the same company when they happened to secure a new project. I'd mostly prefer some stability over how well off I'll be when I'm 65. I'm not even sure I'll make it there at this rate.

None of this is true for the “underclass” mentioned above who have little to look forward to each day

it's all relative, which is why this is hard to contain to a long term chart of "tech is still better off". No one wants to be caught off guard, doing interviews as a full time job for a year a income dwindles (so underselling it as "it's more work than we come to expect over the last 10 years" is underselling it). And even for the tech workers willing to work in the "underclass" jobs, it's not that much easier getting a job. Especially in my area that seems to have a higher than usual unemployment rate.

jurassic
1 replies
16h4m

Sorry you are having a rough search. I was part of a large layoff so I know plenty of people who’ve been through it recently, some more than once if they went into another company that then had layoffs. I’d say the average search in my circle for those actively looking was about 3-4 months, with people who were very junior taking perhaps double that. I got some rejections that shocked and upset me at the time, but now that time has passed I’m glad I’m not in those roles because I found something later I liked much better.

For myself, referrals were a huge part of getting a job somewhat quickly. As more people are looking, the slush pile of resumes gets bigger which causes employers to feel they can be more picky. So if you’re relying on a cold application turning into an interview, that will definitely have a very low success rate.

I know only one person who didn’t get a job for an entire year, one of the smartest people I worked with at my last job, but to be honest it seemed like they were having some mental health / mid-life crisis things going on and not actually applying much if at all. I don’t know you and your situation, and I’m not saying this is the only explanation for a long and fruitless search, but if you think you might be like this person then I’d encourage you to reach out to someone who knows you and get the support you need. Marinating in negative thoughts won’t get you anywhere. This stuff has to be addressed because attitude, emotional state, and overall vibes can bleed into the entire interview performance and undermine what is otherwise a solid showing.

I hope something good comes your way soon.

johnnyanmac
0 replies
11h52m

I was part of a large layoff so I know plenty of people who’ve been through it recently, some more than once if they went into another company that then had layoffs.

Yup. I was hit in one layoff, 3 months later thought I went into a studio that looked like it had a stable publisher, and then the publisher was in fact not stable. So 2 layoffs in 6 months. By layoff #2, the layoff trend was in full force and the market was closing in. I believe I'm now on month 10 of the job search (or 9, since I simply didn't bother searching in December and visited family).

For myself, referrals were a huge part of getting a job somewhat quickly. As more people are looking, the slush pile of resumes gets bigger which causes employers to feel they can be more picky. So if you’re relying on a cold application turning into an interview, that will definitely have a very low success rate.

Well that's the frustrating part. It was super thin on January/February, but by April I was getting plenty of interviews. I have 8-9 years of experience and a well known company on my resume, so I can stand out if I get past the Automated Trash Systems. But the technical interviews have just became a free for all of whatever the interview wants to ask. C++ questions, software engineering questions, specific game engine questions, graphics programming questions (I haven't actually gotten a technical interview for a graphics programming position, but I sure have been asked how to render a triangle, oddly enough), leetcode questions, math questions...

I just simply don't know what to study for these days. I can answer all those questions well, but "well" isn't good enough these days. I need to be absolutely confident on on the top of the ball, but I can't do that for every single aspect of gaming. Too many topics to be a master of all ("master" in the context of an interview). At least if I wasn't getting interviews I could just accept the cold market and focus more on maintaining what I currently have.

but if you think you might be like this person then I’d encourage you to reach out to someone who knows you and get the support you need. Marinating in negative thoughts won’t get you anywhere. This stuff has to be addressed because attitude, emotional state, and overall vibes can bleed into the entire interview performance and undermine what is otherwise a solid showing.

Well there's a lot to be bitter about in my industry, if we're being frank. Game studios are still shutting down or laying off everyweek, no matter how strongly their teams performed, and games are continuing to squeeze on the industry as they push more and more attempts at monetization without necessarily adding more value. No one is feeling very valued in this current state of affairs: not the customers, not the devs, not even the executives.

On a personal note, I did have 2 studios I went assumedly to the end of the process with (6 stages each + recruiter call), only to have no respose whatsoever after the last interviews. Only thing worse than a no at that level of investment is lingering in purgatory as an assumed no. Those would have been surefire offers had I applied 6 months earlier, but alas. I'm truly hitting all the branches on the way down.

Oh, and did I mention the ghosting? There are so many ghosts these days. I remember being contacted by a recruiter for a call, then the call got delayed 1 week, then 2, then cancelled. Never heard from them at all.

I'm usually one to place too much blame on myself, but these days I really don't know what to evaluate from this experiment. It just feels like a circus and I need to keep putting on the clown makeup and doing stunts until someone picks me up. Nothing really feels like it's evaluating my skills and taking my experiences into account past the HR call, so all I can do is throw the dice until something comes out the crapshoot.

------

That's all to say: Sure, I'm bitter. But I don't really let that linger to the next inerview. Quite the contrary. Just a lot of numbness and apathy when beforehand I'd be excited at all the new tech to potentially work on, and all the creativity flowing. It all just feels so sterile these days. So artiicial. Interviews were always superfical, but it feels like no one even tries to pretend to do the motions anymore.

I still have a somewhat healthy social life, and I know how to play the part (I've done it several times before to success). But I definitely do feel interview burnout. one week I'll have 5 interviews where 2 ghost me (very haunting last years, I'll say) past the HR call and 2 others bomb at the technical test, and the week after I would simply just not take any calls. Interviews are way more exhausting than day to day work.

ghaff
3 replies
1d2h

Generalizations are always only somewhat true.

But what you're probably seeing is a reaction to the end of a period when, assuming at least a pulse and some vague familiarity with computers (and maybe some ability to navigate tech interviews), you could walk out of a job on Friday and have multiple offers within a week.

This was basically never the norm with most professional jobs that could take months of job-hunting with no guarantee of a higher salary or not needing to move. I was very lucky over time and it always depended on professional connections.

A lot of people got accustomed to a period that was nothing like the historical norm. I expect very few of them have taken fast food jobs which absolutely happened in 2001.

ryandrake
1 replies
1d1h

you could walk out of a job on Friday and have multiple offers within a week. This was basically never the norm with most professional jobs that could take months of job-hunting with no guarantee of a higher salary or not needing to move.

This was never really the -norm- in tech either. Yes, a small number of very talented, very well-connected software engineers with well-known schools or companies on their resume, could probably leave a job one week and have multiple offers next week, but come on... This has never really been the experience of the vast majority of tech workers.

Sure, if you survey Stanford graduates, working in a hot domain, in top companies Silicon Valley, you're going to conclude that getting jobs has always been easy "in tech."

ghaff
0 replies
1d1h

Totally fair. But that was the narrative. And, yeah, there's been a shift from the "narrative" and I have three "full-time" jobs to I can't get a new job offer in spite of thousands of applications but that was never really the norm in either case.

johnnyanmac
0 replies
21h0m

This was basically never the norm with most professional jobs that could take months of job-hunting with no guarantee of a higher salary or not needing to move.

It's not the norm for most professional jobs to need to study content unrelated to the actual responsibilities for your role, and going through 3-5+ stages of interviews just to get a thumbs up. no other sector is studying interview questions on the side. they either have a standardized license exam to vet their technical expertise, can do a contract/trial period to show their chops ("contractors" in tech aren't really a "downgrade"/less compensated role like in other industries), or otherwise have testing that closely mirrors their day to day.

I expect very few of them have taken fast food jobs which absolutely happened in 2001.

I was in elementary for 2001, so I can't comment much on 2001 or 2009. I have indeed heard some of those people consider 2023/4 to be even worse for the market, however. Just "being good at your job" isn't enough these days, where it sounds like that sufficed in 2001, and the study space for 2009 was at least manageable. But that's secondhand accounts.

api
1 replies
1d2h

It’s harder than it was a few years ago to find a six figure upwardly mobile job.

This is a different world from the one where hundreds of thousands are committing suicide with fentanyl.

johnnyanmac
0 replies
20h59m

I'd take any job, but very few bites outside of tech. So chasing that tech job is literally my path of least resistance.

epolanski
0 replies
1d2h

Just because IT sector has lows, doesn't mean it's a bad one suddenly.

paulmd
1 replies
1d2h

When the proverbial one-horse town/single-industry company town has the single-industry leave town, what exactly do you want anyone to do about it?

We already shovel in far more tax dollars maintaining infrastructure for a handful of remaining occupants even when the economic activity no longer justifies the spend. What further burden, exactly, do you think the rest of the world owes ex-rural communities that have deindustrialized like this?

I’ve been to places like this around here, where mining towns have dried up and there’s only a few early-20th-century dams marking anything at all. You have to drive into unmarked, un-google-mappable state land through the fire roads (the kind of thing that gets people killed-by-GPS out west) to even get there etc, and there used to be a whole town there once for the mines. Serious/honest question, what does the broader public really owe that miner?

America needs to have some hard talks about what to do in these (extremely frequent) situations, because infrastructure can’t be an indefinite commitment once the communities that sustain it wither and shrivel away. And it sucks for the handful of holdouts who don’t want to leave, but the community itself is really already dead. If there are 30 people who don't want to leave their homes, do we keep paving roads and delivering US mail and maintaining hundreds of miles of power lines for the 30 people who won't leave?

That's maybe viable when it's a rare situation, but it's not, anymore - America is folding back inwards after over-expanding during the railroad and industrial eras. There are a lot of "railroad towns" where the trains no longer stop, so to speak. And once "the mine dries up", and those arteries stop pumping, people move on. What do we do about the ones who won't? Society is probably "in the hole" (net economic activity) to the tune of millions of dollars of infrastructure per resident, perhaps tens of millions in some cases, over their lifetime.

A lot of these places literally have population density of sub-1-person-per-sq-mile, there are whole regions with sub-10. It's gauche to say it, but at the end of the day everyone knows there is a number when it's worth it and a number when it's not - just like statistical value of life. And at some point, if the taxpayer is kicking in tens of millions of dollars of artificial subsidy, it's becoming a lifestyle choice that we choose to subsidize. By all means offer them a great deal to buy their property and bulldoze it... but at the end of the day we can't keep paving roads onto mountains just because 10 people don't want to move. That is an economic termite right there - and they would use far less charitable terms to describe the situation, if the tables were reversed.

I feel for people who have to leave their lives behind etc, but infrastructure isn't a suicide pact either. It's not a permanent, lifelong commitment even when the fundamentals on the ground totally change - and not everyone is a legacy homeowner to begin with.

http://travelthemitten.com/landmarks/redridge-steel-dam-an-e...

https://99wfmk.com/redridge-michigan/

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The high and lonely hills stretch far away.
mistrial9
0 replies
1d2h

by demographics and macro trends.

fully agree, and also taxation, access to credit and leverage for profitable assets, many legal loopholes..

Pickitty says in-part that rewards are disproportionately moving to capital assets, at the same time devaluing the fundamental components of life and liberty .. food stocks, common labor, political freedoms from taxation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty

Intuition says that increased surveillance by law enforcement to produce convictions that cost money and time are economically crippling to building a middle class from a labor pool and small-holder individuals. A people without hope and progress become mired in common failure and produce a downward spiral of personal life, as described.

johnnyanmac
0 replies
21h25m

I'm doing awful, personally. But I guess my industry is an exception among exceptions. Still feels bad.

raizer88
39 replies
1d5h

"The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it," - Jeff Bezos

BolexNOLA
38 replies
1d4h

That’s a pretty weird take to me. Crime stats and polling of people’s perception of crime show this as clearly the wrong approach for instance.

Most studies show that no matter what direction crime is going in, a substantial majority of people think their neighborhoods are safer and that everywhere else is basically a war zone that is getting worse. There’s a total disconnect locally/nationally in perception that is also detached from crime stats.

All of this is to say that the anecdotes are basically all but worthless in the case of understanding how bad crime is on any appreciable scale beyond a few blocks of one’s neighborhood.

* https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/11/16/voters-pe...

* https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-americans-are-conv...

* https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23663437/crime-violence-m...

* https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/as-concerns-grow-aroun...

llm_trw
12 replies
1d3h

Crime stats and polling of people’s perception of crime show this as clearly the wrong approach for instance.

The only crime stat you can trust is murder and that's because bodies can't be hidden (easily).

Everything else gets swept under the rug.

When I wanted to report my car broken into I was hung up on three times because of a poor quality line, which was fine before I told them what I was calling for. When I went there in person I had to wait 40 minutes for someone to take my report and give me a reference number for my insurance.

Crime is absolutely massively under reported.

varjag
6 replies
1d3h

But this hasn't changed over decades. Policing never was 100% effective and crime was always underreported. Yet if you ask people it's crime getting worse YoY.

fallingknife
2 replies
1d1h

Policing was effective enough that I never had to find someone to unlock a case for me at the store unless I was purchasing something particularly valuable. It was effective enough that you didn't see videos of people looting stores or driving around breaking into cars with impunity.

varjag
0 replies
21h17m

I don't know, these things were cliche plot devices in 1970s-1980s films and it appears everyone was convinced America headed into Escape From New York future. Naturally, few people had cine/video cameras on them at any time.

BolexNOLA
0 replies
18h29m

That’s because companies have successfully PR’d their way into “shoplifting is the greatest threat to the US economy.”

shakow
0 replies
1d1h

But as long as the stats are not reliable, that's unknown territory. Maybe the police is getting more lazier, maybe less, maybe there are less people reporting because it is seen as useless, maybe there are more because they get tired of it, one can simply not get a picture independently of where the trend is going.

marcosdumay
0 replies
21h20m

And yet, if more people you know report being victims of crime, and the official statistics point to a decrease, the people upthread are happy to declare a decrease.

llm_trw
0 replies
1d2h

It's getting worse.

mr_toad
1 replies
12h52m

The only crime stat you can trust is murder and that's because bodies can't be hidden (easily).

Seems to be a significant decline since the 90’s, followed by an increase since 2016, and a Covid dip followed by a resumption of the increase. It’s still a lot lower than it was in the 90’s.

llm_trw
0 replies
6h48m

Medical technology has also improved dramatically since the 90s.

enavari
1 replies
1d3h

One need only download a community based self reporting app like "citizen" to see how much crime really exist.. It's more than you'd like know. Like the previous poster said, not everything is reported.

ryandrake
0 replies
1d1h

I'm sure apps like this are targeted towards an already paranoid and crime-obsessed demographic, and they're going to be full of false positives. Not sure you can take that sample as representative.

Spooky23
0 replies
1d3h

100% correct. They even teach this in graduate criminology programs. Stats are only consistently reliable for a narrow range of events.

flakeoil
9 replies
1d2h

It's probably related to how much or little we read about crime more than any true crime level. If we see 10 news articles everyday about crime, then we think there are a lot of crime around. If we read zero articles about crime, then it barely exists in our perception. What happens in reality does not affect our perception as much, as we probably seldomly see it for ourselves and when we see it, it would be difficult to objectively and statistically judge the crime level's direction with such few data points and biased experiences.

It's similar to Hans Rosling's comments about poverty in the 3rd world. It often sounds like poverty is increasing as time goes by, but if looking at statistics, overall poverty is decreasing and have been doing so for decades.

uoaei
7 replies
1d2h

Exactly, in the case of crime there are so many more vicarious anecdotes. If people were only allowed to discuss crimes that they were personally victim to, we would not be under the impression that crime is worse than ever.

fallingknife
6 replies
1d1h

When I have to spend 10 minutes finding a store employee to unlock a case for me to buy underwear and socks at Target when I didn't have to five years ago, I conclude that crime has gotten worse.

When I see videos on the internet all the time of criminals just walking into stores and grabbing whatever they want while the security guard looks on and does nothing because the police will side with the criminal if he touches them, it is perfectly valid to assume that crime is worse.

When the police do nothing to enforce the law I do not trust the statistics because they are based on reports to the police.

Maybe the statistics are right, over the whole city, but where I live, crime has gotten worse.

ryandrake
3 replies
1d1h

When I see videos on the internet all the time of criminals just walking into stores and grabbing whatever they want while the security guard looks on and does nothing because the police will side with the criminal if he touches them, it is perfectly valid to assume that crime is worse.

How many videos have you seen on the Internet of stores just calmly going about business with no shoplifting going on? The number of videos on the Internet is not an indication of any overall trend. The stuff you're seeing makes it onto YouTube because they are outliers.

fallingknife
1 replies
1d1h

Why have I only started seeing these outliers in the last few years? Also, the worst part of the videos isn't that they happen, but that they are allowed to happen. If the criminals weren't calmly going about their business without even wearing a mask and instead running from the security guard it wouldn't be so frustrating. If the news stories had a mugshot of the police arresting them quickly since their face is all over the internet it wouldn't be so infuriating. If the police didn't allow the criminals to run open air fencing operations right outside BART stations, I wouldn't be this mad.

ryandrake
0 replies
1d

Could there be other reasons why these videos are being uploaded more, and why you are being served them more over the last few years? Access to videography has been growing constantly since smartphones were introduced. There are now multiple platforms for uploading these videos, and doing so is easier than ever. These platforms algorithmically optimize for engagement and do this by promoting ragebait and controversy. And there are now entire, active communities dedicated to sharing/spreading/promoting these (r/PublicFreakout has almost 5M members). What you happen to be seeing may not reflect any sort of trend, either up or down.

GOD_Over_Djinn
0 replies
23h52m

I don’t see this stuff on YouTube, I see it in the real world in the course of my everyday life.

rightbyte
1 replies
1d

Where do you live? It sounds quite bad. Has SF got that bad? I haven't been there since I worked there in 2015, but I read the authorites gave up on some crime?

I noticed neither any crime or homeless at that time. But people now seem swear it has gotten to be a big problem.

MSFT_Edging
0 replies
21h45m

I was last there a couple years ago when the "SF is a lawless wasteland" nonsense was gaining a lot of traction. I saw some needles, some foil, a broken window or two, but otherwise it was a very calm and inviting city. Any city due to greater density will have more observable crime, but people are crapping their pants over exaggerations.

epolanski
0 replies
22h10m

I don't buy this completely.

The measure of the perceived crime level in one's neighborhood isn't really dictated by stats or news, but your own and your neighbours lifes.

I know where I live is quite calm bar some occasional burglar, and I know it because I live in the place and talk to people everyday.

izacus
8 replies
1d3h

You're making the exact same mistake as the poster you're answering to warns about - you're mixing the objective reality ("absolute crime numbers") to percieved reality of population.

If the population percieves themselves unsafe and unhappy, your numbers don't really mean much to them because to restore happy society you need to look at *perception* and fix the reasoning behind it. Making the crime stats number go down won't do that by itself.

estebank
6 replies
1d3h

you need to look at perception and fix the reasoning behind it.

Many times that perception is shaped by the media we consume, which has no obligation to have any connection to the reality on the ground. At that point whatever is done to improve the reality doesn't have to have any impact on people's perception.

izacus
3 replies
1d2h

Which means that the fix is to change the media not the metrics. That's the gist of the argument - if your improvements of "reality" aren't making people happier, you're changing the wrong metric. In this case you need to change the media, not crime stats.

estebank
2 replies
1d

Changing the underlying reality without improving the perception leads to a political disconnect. Improving the perception without improving the underlying reality just makes people happier, but not better off. You have to do both if your objective is to improve people's lifes.

izacus
0 replies
10h59m

Indeed, which is why I ended up my original post with "by itself". Changing the state is a necessary, but not sufficient action.

eszed
0 replies
7h21m

I agree. So, which one do you prioritize? Currently, it seems to me as if people's (mis)perceptions are leading them to vote against policies that will make them better off, so we need to correct perceptions first.

pixl97
1 replies
1d2h

I don't really watch any broadcast/cable news these days. Was at a restaurant that had it going on their TV and my goodness all it was saying is "FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR". Absolute mind rotting garbage.

BolexNOLA
0 replies
1d2h

I was at an airport the other day and I was struck by how I saw four different new stations all covering one tornado in a town half way across the country from me. This was top line national news for like 20min with reporters standing by downed trees and going on and on about the “utter devastation.” It seemed pretty small potatoes tbh but maybe I was missing context?

You would think there is some sort of tornado epidemic nationwide based on the way they were acting. Tornadoes happen all of the time, and they are very tragic for those involved, but y’all aren’t hearing about every house that burns down in my city lol

BolexNOLA
0 replies
1d3h

In a different response I actually remarked on how I would never talk down to people who feel unsafe because we can cite all the stats we want in the world, but their feeling secure is very important as well.

fjdidianabak
1 replies
1d3h

I dunno, it seems in line with most stereotypes being more true than false [1]. “Common sense” is often derided in online spaces like this, but when there hasn’t been a massive media / social effort to convince the population otherwise [2], it’s pretty reliable.

Taking a quick glance at the articles you linked shows the same behavior as those reporting on the economy - defining disingenuous targets so they can claim their headline is true. To tie this back to anecdotes, I think it comes down to trust. When my neighbor says they’re afraid to lose their job due to housing, food, childcare being a lot more expensive I dont see any motivated reasoning behind that statement. On the other end, economists (and all the articles you linked) have many incentives to distort the truth. On average anecdotes are going to come from a more truthful place - both because you trust the source and know their biases.

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/2018...

[2] https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/41556-americans-m...

BolexNOLA
0 replies
1d3h

I definitely understand where you are coming from and would never deny these things are happening. But my point is that argues for too much trust in anecdotes and people’s perceptions.

We all know memory is incredibly faulty, for instance. Yet people have a very high perception of their own memory’s accuracy. It’s kind of in the same vein. It’s not that people can’t remember things accurately, it’s that we need to start from a place of skepticism when depending on it. Same thing goes for people’s perceptions of crime, the economy, etc. Their anecdotes and lived experience, insofar as they can even accurately explain their lived experience, needs to be put into context re: its value for determining “reality.”

That being said I would never undermine the value of how people feel. If people don’t feel safe, that is a bad thing too. And we can cite all the stats in the world we want but ultimately feeling unsafe is not a good thing and that perception needs to be addressed.

dasil003
1 replies
1d3h

It’s just a refutation of naive bias towards statistics, which is rampant in big organizations (see the McNamara fallacy). This is codified in the idea of being “data driven”, which is the right thing if your data is a true proxy for the thing you care about; in practice it often isn’t and you have to incorporate some more flimsy or subjective signal to better understand a problem.

GOD_Over_Djinn
0 replies
23h50m

Bingo. The obsession with quantification is a crutch that allows uncreative people to delegate their decision making to a mechanical analysis of raw data, rather than a first-principles understanding of their problem space.

fallingknife
0 replies
1d1h

This is actually a perfect example of Bezos being right on the money. You are measuring it wrong. The first and last articles focus only on violent crime, which is not what most people who are complaining about crime mean here. 538 is a little better, but their charts only go through 2019 before it became a major issue again. Only Vox seems to get it closer to correct (though still hung up on the violence thing):

One theory that came up again and again is that city residents and visitors are, to some extent, conflating actual violent crime with broader indications of urban disorder.

If you are a leader like Bezos or a city politician you need to meet your customers / constituents where they are and fix the problems they want fixed whether or not it they are saying precisely what they mean. The anecdotes are right and the statistics are wrong.

creer
0 replies
23h5m

That's fair that perception is often wrong - but that's a different issue.

Perception is also in large part the very thing that matters when it comes to crime. That is, do I get to live in peace or in constant worry? Do I get my property priced "fairly" when I sell or dramatically underpriced because of this perception that the area is unsafe? To summarize, in what you describe "crime stats" are ignoring half or two thirds of the problem.

In San Francisco, "crime stats" are further muddied because of massive underreporting and cherry picking the definition. So called quality of life crime might be considered irrelevant because it rarely causes massive loss of property or injury. But it does make life extremely stressful for the locals (depending on the neighborhoods where it might be "tolerated" i.e. left rampant, or might not be tolerated.) In this case, "crime stats" deliberately not measuring anything very relevant.

See also recent discussion of the squatting issue in Spain.

gruez
26 replies
1d2h

I think this goes the other way around. Our method for understanding the economy is flawed and is not properly capturing what all consumers know intuitively, things kind of suck, even when you have a job and even when you're still buying things.

It seems kind of lazy to observe that anecdotes contradict statistics, and then conclude that it's the statistics are wrong without providing any empirical evidence to the contrary. This style of argumentation basically allows you to make whatever "intuitive" claim you want and handwave any empirical evidence to the contrary because the empirical evidence isn't "capturing what [we] all know intuitively".

AnimalMuppet
23 replies
1d2h

Anecdote would be saying that some individual over on 4th Street feels that things aren't that great. "Consumer sentiment" (or whatever name) is actually a statistic.

So now you're at two statistics, one that measures economic activity in jobs and output, and the other that measures peoples' intuitive feel of the economy. I think the gap between them might be that peoples' confidence was shaken by inflation reigniting after 15 years.

gruez
22 replies
1d1h

But polls show that around of population are flat out wrong on certain objective measures, like GDP, the S&P 500 index, and the unemployment rate[1]. If they can't get basic factual questions right, why should we put much stock in their "intuitive feel of the economy"?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/22/poll...

CPLX
16 replies
1d1h

Guys this isn’t that complicated.

Basically every commercial interaction you have these days involves someone trying to cheat you, with basically no way to find recourse to human understanding or help.

It’s every day, every time you interact with a corporation as a consumer. It fucking sucks profoundly and people are completely exhausted by it.

Have you really not noticed?

gruez
15 replies
1d

But the questions isn't "how do you feel about the economy", it's "do you think the s&p 500 went up or down". Even if you think the stockmarket is fake and disconnected from what actually happens on main st, you should still be able to correctly answer whether it went up or not. Failing to do so shows that either you have no grasp on how the S&P 500 is actually doing, can't hold opposing concepts it your head (ie. the "real economy" is doing shit but the S&P 500 is doing great), or can't follow basic instructions. Neither makes me confident in other things you're saying, like how how good the economy is.

CPLX
14 replies
1d

you should still be able to correctly answer whether it went up or not

Why? Who fucking cares?

Some guy calls my phone during dinner with some survey about the economy. I answer every question with a variation on “fuck you and your economy” and then hang up.

I grew up in a family of social scientists and yet it still shocks me how much people actually believe the words “studies say” and “experts insist” when it comes to matters of human sentiment and opinion.

gruez
13 replies
1d

I grew up in a family of social scientists and yet it still shocks me how much people actually believe the words “studies say” and “experts insist” when it comes to matters of human sentiment and opinion.

But the question we're asking isn't "how people feel about the economy", it's "how the economy is actually doing". I don't think anyone here is seriously arguing that the public is wrong about their own "sentiment and opinion". They're going to be right almost by definition. What is actually being disputed is whether public's "sentiment and opinion" actually reflects reality. To that question I don't see why we should give unlimited credence to "human sentiment and opinion".

CPLX
12 replies
1d

Do they get a reward for being "right" in the eyes of the survey company or something? They are being asked how the economy is doing and they are saying fuck this. I'm guessing people have a basic sense that when they answer a media survey they're contributing to the narrative that the media will use, and they want the narrative to be this sucks. It's really not that deep.

As for "sentiment and opinion" it's the basis for democracy. Of course we should give unlimited credence to it when deciding how to organize society, what's the other approach?

gruez
11 replies
23h50m

Do they get a reward for being "right" in the eyes of the survey company or something? They are being asked how the economy is doing and they are saying fuck this. I'm guessing people have a basic sense that when they answer a media survey they're contributing to the narrative that the media will use, and they want the narrative to be this sucks. It's really not that deep.

They don't, but like I said earlier it's fair to question the veracity of their statements if they can't get objective questions right. Moreover, if it's really the case as you claim that they don't care about the object level question and only care about "the narrative", what makes you think that the "the narrative" stops at the economy and not at some high level like "the political system" or "society"? In other words what makes you think they actually think the economy is doing bad, and they're not answering dishonestly because they're disaffected about the government/politics/society as a whole?

As for "sentiment and opinion" it's the basis for democracy. Of course we should give unlimited credence to it when deciding how to organize society, what's the other approach?

Again, you're conflating "how people feel about the economy" and "how the economy is actually doing". Moreover, "sentiment and opinion" might be "the basis for democracy", but it doesn't follow that when it comes to factual and objective questions it should get unlimited credence.

CPLX
10 replies
23h33m

Again, you're conflating "how people feel about the economy" and "how the economy is actually doing".

Indeed. And you're suffering from the delusion that there's some kind of distinction here that matters.

There isn't. The economy fucking sucks. It sucks because normal people feel trapped and helpless in the face of corporate power and constant, rampant unethical conduct and cheating that seems to permeate literally every daily commercial interaction. When you ask them about the economy they answer that it fucking sucks, because, it does, for them, daily. This is bad and it keeps making people's daily lives worse.

If you haven't experienced that then congratulations, you're either living a very isolated or minimalist life or you have financial resources that put you above this dynamic. Or maybe you don't live in the US. Or maybe you're building the tools and processes that are inflicting this misery on others. Who knows.

But my argument is that most readers of this article and comment thread should be able to look around and realize what's happening without resorting to regression analysis. I think most people here have cushy employment for the most part so you'll have to look elsewhere. Have you tried to interact with an airline lately? Healthcare billing? A bank?

It's a fucking horror show. Now, extraplolate what that experience would be like if it was every single part of your actual job. Like you actually worked for a company that treats you, the employee, the way Comcast treats you when you want to cancel service?

Ever tried getting someone from Uber to talk to you as a customer? You think they treat drivers differently? What if you're driving for them to feed your children? What kind of mood would you be in? How would you think "the economy" is going?

Did you know that you can apply, get hired, and actually start work at an Amazon warehouse without speaking verbally to a single human being ever? Like you literally go online and fill out forms, go to a building and use a kiosk to check in, and so on, and are on the job without a single conversation.

Can you try to actually really think about what being in this economy feels like to most people?

Now call them and ask them how the economy is doing. Do you think they trust you, an educated social scientist employed at faceless corporation that is calling them to publish some news report on what they think? Do you think they're interested in impressing you with their stock market fluency? To the extent they are willing to talk to you at all it's in the hopes that you'll fucking listen to them when they tell you to fucking do something about this for once.

For half a dozen cycles in a row voters have picked the person they thought was least in service of the assholes who are in charge and inflicting this on everyone, increasingly agitated that nobody actually fucking does anything about it. They'll be doing it again later this year.

AnimalMuppet
7 replies
22h37m

Yeah. For normal people, "I am the economy". That is, I don't care about the national economy or the world economy. I don't care about how many widgets get produced this month. What difference does it make to me if the national economy is doing great, but I'm going broke? I care whether I can afford to buy what I need this month. To me, that's the economy.

(With "I" meaning the average person, not me personally.)

gruez
6 replies
22h13m

Yet as a whole, people estimate the nation's economy worse than their own. Clearly this can't be the case if everyone thinks their economic circumstances are the nation's economic circumstances, because if that were the case you'd expect them to align on a national basis.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/05/23/views-of-the...

AnimalMuppet
5 replies
21h25m

I think you could (almost) build a consistent picture: Economic output is doing well, a lot of people are working, but the rich are taking all the gains and the workers are just barely surviving.

The problem is, if that's the case, who's buying all the output? It's not just going into warehouses. So people must be able to buy all this stuff.

An alternate view would be that people have been buying all this stuff, mostly on credit, and are realizing that they're maxed out on credit, especially if interest rates rise.

But ultimately, the "sentiment" view matters. It may not matter as much as the actual output numbers, but it matters, because people are not purely "homo economicus". They make decisions on how they feel about how things are going, and if they think things are going badly, they buy less, and eventually that influences the actual figures.

CPLX
4 replies
20h53m

I think you could (almost) build a consistent picture: Economic output is doing well, a lot of people are working, but the rich are taking all the gains and the workers are just barely surviving.

You figured it out.

Maybe replace "the rich" with "those with capital and market power" but that's mostly a distinction without a difference.

AnimalMuppet
3 replies
20h8m

Could you now address the objection? If that's the case, who's buying all the output?

CPLX
2 replies
17h56m

Those to whom the returns on capital are accruing.

Again none of this stuff is super groundbreaking. Shantytown hills overlooking mansions surrounded by high walls and barbed wire is kind of a global norm.

As America edges closer it only feels unfamiliar to those of us that have become accustomed to something different.

AnimalMuppet
1 replies
6h7m

I don't believe it.

Take cars specifically. The US makes 11 million new cars a month. If regular people can't afford them, are billionaires really buying up all those cars? How many new cars does a billionaire need? Where are they parking them all?

I can believe your explanation with money. I can even believe it with houses, with rich people buying up houses as an investment. But I can't believe it with cars. Regular people are buying new cars, and regular people think they can't afford new cars. How do we make sense of that?

CPLX
0 replies
1h6m

Because cars wear out and are scrapped? Not sure where you're going with this.

gruez
1 replies
22h15m

Indeed. And you're suffering from the delusion that there's some kind of distinction here that matters.

There isn't.

the distinction does matter because policy discussion should be around facts rather than vibes. Voters are the ultimate arbiters for what policy should be, but that doesn't mean we should shrug when their beliefs are objectively wrong.

The economy fucking sucks. It sucks because [...]

All the points you've made about bad the economy talks past the points raised by mainstream economists. Sure, "trapped and helpless in the face of corporate power" isn't great, but how does that compare to 10% unemployment, or an actual recession? What makes for a economy that doesn't "fucking sucks"? More to the point, vibecession might have started post pandemic, but everything you said existed to some extent pre-pandemic. Has "corporate power and constant, rampant unethical conduct and cheating" actually gotten worse? Or did the perception get worse? That's the problem with going off vibes. Because there's no attempt to quantify it, it's possible to know whether something actually got worse, or people merely thought it got worse. You argue that people "should be able to look around and realize what's happening without resorting to regression analysis", but this comment section is full of examples where people were misinformed about various things (eg. objective economic measures or crime stats). You end up having to come up with contrived explanations to explain their behavior (ie. them being wrong on factual questions shouldn't impact their credibility because they're being wrong to express rage against the system).

CPLX
0 replies
1h7m

the distinction does matter because policy discussion should be around facts rather than vibes.

You're just suggesting we use different vibes.

There's nothing more factual about a random opinion survey or report from an economic research organization with an agenda than anything else.

Mainstream economics IS all vibes at this point. Not sure how someone could miss it.

Izkata
4 replies
1d1h

That's exactly the point - there's some sort of disconnect and people just want to say "they're wrong" instead of trying to figure out why people feel that way.

gruez
3 replies
1d

people just want to say "they're wrong" instead of trying to figure out why people feel that way.

Why are these two things positioned as opposing/contradictory? Why can't those people be wrong but we still try to figure out why they think that way?

CPLX
2 replies
20h49m

Ask yourself the reverse question now.

Why can't it be true that the economics profession is wrong, or better yet "not even wrong" and not really even talking about anything that has real world applicability?

Given the last few decades that should probably be the starting premise of any analysis.

gruez
1 replies
20h30m

Why can't it be true that the economics profession is wrong, or better yet "not even wrong" and not really even talking about anything that has real world applicability?

I'm not ruling it out, only pointing out that it's a lazy argument to handwave away the statistics while not providing evidence that's equal or better than the ones you're trying to refute. This is especially true when the discrepancy is from a group of people who can't get basic facts right. Maybe they're actually right but there's some contrived reason they're not answering straightforward factual questions correctly, or maybe they're just wrong.

CPLX
0 replies
18h1m

I have a degree in economics and both my parents taught economics and I grew up with a couple Nobel prize winners in economics around the dinner table from time to time.

Which, in fairness, I didn’t mention earlier and isn’t necessarily something that moves forward a message board discussion anyways.

But like maybe consider the possibility that at this point “mainstream economics” is a lot closer to astrology than it is to science.

ramblenode
1 replies
1d

It seems kind of lazy to observe that anecdotes contradict statistics, and then conclude that it's the statistics are wrong without providing any empirical evidence to the contrary.

Anecdotes are empirical evidence. Statistics are just collections of anecdotes obtained through systematized processes. As such, statistics are only as good as the process. 1 good observation can be better than 100 bad observations.

gruez
0 replies
23h59m

If you want to be nitpicky I suppose you can claim that anecdotes is technically evidence and therefore that statement is incorrect, but in the context of that comment it doesn't change much. We basically have data collected by statisticians at government agencies compared to... people's vibes. As you said yourself "1 good observation can be better than 100 bad observations", so I still think it's a poor argument to claim the professional statistics are wrong, and the only evidence you have is evidence that's worse than the ones you're trying to refute.

silverquiet
18 replies
1d5h

I agree with much of this and I'll add one of my biggest stressors - opaque pricing. One of the biggest "innovations" in the US in the last decade or so seems to be to add as many hidden fees as possible to every service imaginable. Obviously it's hardly a new idea; I'm sure that human nature being what it is, they had to deal with it in Mesopotamia. But it makes budgeting very difficult; I suppose it's like living in a corrupt country; you just have to add an overhead for bribes as part of day-to-day living. Perhaps it isn't "like" living in a corrupt country; perhaps it just is living in a corrupt country.

phkahler
10 replies
1d4h

> I'll add one of my biggest stressors - opaque pricing.

Economic "models" make assumptions like markets being efficient. Meanwhile in the business classes next door they teach how to avoid competition because it's a race to the bottom. They all learn the prisoners dilemma as an example because it's how you need to think to avoid overt collusion.

I'd like an economic model as powerful as the laws of thermodynamics, where everything is included if not explicitly. But I haven't seen one.

JumpCrisscross
3 replies
1d4h

Economic "models" make assumptions like markets being efficient

No? You’re thinking of a specific class of models. Generally speaking, prescriptive economics is about characterising what an efficient market would look like and then identifying why reality is not that. (And whether that deviance is good or bad.)

This article could be seen doing that. It seems like domains should be closed to $2, given an efficient market. But they’re nine going on twelve.

pydry
2 replies
1d3h

Most of the assumptions made in economic models conceal sources of profit.

They dont appear to be there to simplify complexity because they simulate situations that have never and will never be approximated (never been perfect competition or information, never will be).

It's unlike, say, physics in this respect.

JumpCrisscross
1 replies
1d

Most of the assumptions made in economic models conceal sources of profit

This is wildly inaccurate. A huge amount of economics is focussed on profit. For obvious reasons.

never been perfect competition or information, never will be

Frictionless surfaces are mostly a fiction, too. That doesn’t mean calculating the expected outcome in a frictionless condition is useless. If the deviance is more than you’d expect from friction, that’s informative.

Unlike physics, a lot of people think their undergrad 101 course plus skimming the Economist an economist themselves makes. It’s a common hubris, albeit one unusually common in tech. (Disclaimer: I’m not an economist. But I know the boundaries of my circle of competence in this.)

pydry
0 replies
3h15m

This is wildly inaccurate. A huge amount of economics is focussed on profit. For obvious reasons.

As an example there are countless studies looking at the relationship between the minimum wage and employment and off the top of my head I can think of maybe 2 off the top of my head that measure the relationship between the minimum wage and profit.

For obvious reasons. The same reasons.

It's not a great way to get ahead in your scientific profession to point out things which make the people with the money and the power uncomfortable - Galileo discovered that one.

chaorace
2 replies
1d3h

Economic "models" make assumptions like markets being efficient. Meanwhile in the business classes next door they teach how to avoid competition because it's a race to the bottom

You've more-or-less verbatim described the impetus behind the modern development of behavioral economics. That older sort of classical theory which you describe -- the one which frames the world in terms of "rational economic agents" -- has been out of vogue for nearly two decades now. Sure, you can still find the idea taught in classes... but professors now treat the classical ideas more like a simplified foundation rather than gospel -- much like a physics professor teaches Newtonian Physics before moving on to Relativity.

I'd like an economic model as powerful as the laws of thermodynamics, where everything is included if not explicitly. But I haven't seen one.

... and this is where you diverge in thinking from the new-school behavioral economists. According to the new-school, economics is a social science, a thing of statistical measurements and probabilities. Most modern economists would probably be inclined to chide you and say that attempting to characterize economics in terms of hard laws would be the same as disregarding the human element -- a reversion to the classical idea of "rational economic agents".

ghaff
0 replies
1d2h

Somewhat. Some of the science behind behavioral economics relates to the fact that there are actually rationales behind certain preferences that aren't strictly about expected value. The utility of money is not a linear function. Etc.

People also don't understand statistics well as a whole, to be sure. But behavioral economics is also not purely about people being irrational.

specialist
0 replies
1d3h

Yup.

Economic "models" make assumptions like markets being efficient.

Open markets require rules and referees.

Freedom Markets™ advocates eliminate rules and refs. Because "regulations discourages free enterprise".

The final result are closed markets.

"free market" is doublespeak for winner-takes-all, anti-competition, pro-monopolies, plantation class, and neoliberalism.

mr_toad
0 replies
13h2m

Economic "models" make assumptions like markets being efficient.

There’s probably more ink devoted to the study of market failures in economic literature than perfect markets. Nobody is getting tenure by developing models of perfect markets.

Terr_
0 replies
23h57m

Yeah, "the free market" tends to have cheerleaders with contradictory premises for how it will work. For example:

1. "With perfect price/deal information, this math shows economic actors will be super duper efficient."

2. "Since people have the freedom to make secret deals for hidden prices, this prevents cartels by allowing defection."

Unfortunately it feels like rather than addressing the contradiction, they prefer to quietly march under the same banner and in the end we get neither benefit.

ChainOfFools
4 replies
1d3h

This seems to be rooted in a generalized problem which I'll hastily call the conscious abuse of polite understanding, or abuse of economic consensus. Another possible rubric for this, a bit more sensationalized, would be "destructive precision".

A simple example would be the hollowing-out of conventional terms everyone believes they hold the same settled definition of, such as "a flight." Instead of transacting according to what consensus suggests "a flight" meant a decade or two ago, when most would have expected this term to have thoroughly matured to the point of semantic stability, instead delivering against the most contextually minimized, stripped down interpretation of the term possible that still qualifies as valid, and attaching fees to all of the other attendant associations of value that used to be included in the scope of general consensus of the term.

lotsofpulp
1 replies
1d2h

On the other hand, I recall paying roughly $100 per hour of one way flight time in the 2000s, and I still pay near $100, maybe $150 to $200 in peak season (including seat assignment and carry on luggage).

ghaff
0 replies
1d2h

I don't love taking flights in general--and my goal moving forward is to reduce the number of flights relative to the amount of travel overall. But I'm also well aware I could make my travel more comfortable but at an hourly cost that I'd probably much rather spend on other travel things. (Not that I cheap out beyond some floor.)

SI_Rob
1 replies
1d3h

So, a pricing exploit based on arbitrage between the rigorous description (and enforcement) of payment for a service in one direction, and the comparatively un-policed description of the service delivered, in the other? Perhaps the lawyering class wants everyone to either suffer under their miserable penchant for overweening semantic nitpicking, or suffer it along with them.

ChainOfFools
0 replies
1d

A description versus price equation, where there's a lot of variables on one side and only one on the other, does seem to be the model.

I guess I would add that it may only be a Salient as it is with respect to certain things like flights, because there are a couple of outstanding counter examples like cell phones and and automobiles which seem to exhibit the exact opposite trend.

A deeper analysis might reveal that there is a cycle at at work here, wherein the initial novelty of a prodict or service which is destined to become a commodity, means there is not yet a strong set of expectations about what the service or product is "supposed" to provide. distinction in the market has to come from adding context to that essentially commodity utility.

But later on some consumers begin to recognize that some of the additional context may not be strictly necessary or offer a value to them and would prefer compartmentalization of the core product as distinct from its value-added variants.

When flights were a comparative novelty, or at least a novelty in different market segments at different times, distinction between products was through different levels and configurations of service or features rather than price.

This may still be the phase of the product cycle that cell phones (setting aside the fairly stable tiers of product within that category) are in. It's harder to make as direct across the comparison with cars as they are older than both air travel and mobile phones, and because of all the regulation that enforces standardization of non-optional features related to safety.

euroderf
0 replies
1d1h

The EU fixed it for airline tickets. It's not rocket surgery.

chasebank
0 replies
1d1h

Recently, I've seen this bleed into our local housing rental market. They'll advertise some amount for the house, then will say the attached garage is extra per month, and moving most if not all utilities to tenant responsibility.

AbstractH24
12 replies
1d4h

Why do you exclude the possibility that talking heads in news and politics are pedaling the idea that consumers feel it’s terrible?

Most everyone I know seems to be living it pretty good with much less concern for the future. Certainly compared to 2023 and even compared to 2019.

wholinator2
9 replies
1d3h

That's very good for you, you should count yourself lucky. But i think we should trust people when they tell us how they feel. Do you live paycheck to paycheck? Are you aware that a majority oh Americans (55-69%) do, defined as struggling to save or invest anything past the monthly expenses?

I'm a late 20s man who made it into tech, I'm doing great! My friend who got into tech might kind of hate their corporate job lives but they're monetarily at least able to pay their student loans after 5 years of working. A few kids were able to start construction/lawn businesses, i don't know the details but they appear to be doing well. Every single other person that i know, who's finances I'm aware of directly, or indirectly (social media posts, etc. ) is having a hard time right now. I can count on one hand the number of people who feel good about the current US economy that i know, i speak and have spoken to dozens of people about this.

Literally only the comp sci graduates are having a good time right now, and even that's starting to tighten. Jobs are getting more scarce, people have to take pay cuts to be able to actually have a life again, etc. You could say I'm doing well right now and then i could say that must mean everyone is doing well and the whole thing is propaganda. But there's a lot more than just successful people out here, we're on HN anyways, that says a lot about our socioeconomic status and friend groups.

randomdata
8 replies
15h26m

> Are you aware that a majority oh Americans (55-69%) do, defined as struggling to save or invest anything past the monthly expenses?

How can that be? Only ~30-35% of Americans rent a home, which means that ~65-70% of Americans either own a home or are freeloading (e.g. living with parents). Only ~3% of homes are considered to be underwater, which means virtually all those who own a home have been able to save over and above their monthly expenses.

So, especially on the high end, if 69% of Americans are unable to save, while virtually all homeowners have been able to save, and even if we assume all renters cannot afford to save, that suggests 34% of Americans are freeloaders. It seems highly unlikely that all renters are unable to save (what about the tech people who rent?), but whatever.

How do we resolve that? The freeloader figure is in the ballpark of what the data suggests if you are counting all the way down to babies. Is that what you've done here? But nobody would ever think that a baby should have an income that allows them to save, so you're kind of being disingenuous if that is the case. I find it hard to believe you would state this figure including children.

Or is it that you mean 55-69% of Americans do not have money in a savings account – as in a specific type of bank account? I have seen reports like that before so maybe that's where you got the idea? If that's what you mean, it is quite believable that the majority do not keep money parked in a savings account. The interest rates in such accounts are rarely compelling, so why would they?

yareal
7 replies
4h14m

Being underwater on a mortgage and not being able to save aren't the same.

A mortgage that is underwater means the value of the home is less than the loan balance. That can happen for any number of reasons.

It doesn't mean anything about your ability to save money. If you make $5k a month and spend $5k on expenses, you can make all your mortgage payments (whether or not that mortgage is underwater) but still not save.

When outlets report savings of Americans they don't typically mean just in savings accounts.

randomdata
6 replies
4h11m

> A mortgage that is underwater means the value of the home is less than the loan balance.

Indeed. Which means that when a home is not underwater, the owner has savings (or is breaking even, of course, but that is as equally unlikely and is for all intents and purposes considered to be the same as underwater).

> If you make $5k a month and spend $5k on expenses, you can make all your mortgage payments (whether or not that mortgage is underwater) but still not save.

Interest-only loans account for only 1-2% of mortgages. Outside of that small group, and the small group underwater (which very well may be the same group), if you are paying a mortgage, a portion of that is a portion you are saving. Mathematically, that has to be true. There is no way around it.

> When outlets report savings of Americans they don't typically mean just in savings accounts.

So, then, again the numbers don't add up unless we're counting children. Why would you count babies in those not able to save? Is a newborn not making enough money to be able to save a problem or somehow notable?

yareal
5 replies
3h23m

Which means that when a home is not underwater, the owner has savings (or breaking even, of course, but that is as equally unlikely and is for all intents and purposes considered to be the same as underwater).

What? It doesn't mean this at all. You can have savings and still be underwater. If you have a 3.5% for your mortgage, but the market crashes after you bought at the peak, you can be underwater because your house lost value. And it would be foolish to pay down the loan rather than get a better rate for your savings.

Underwater mortgages are totally orthogonal concepts to savings.

if you are paying a mortgage, a portion of that is a portion you are saving

I think I see your confusion. Yes, money saved into a home is an asset that you are building over time. However it's a non liquid asset, it's difficult to turn back into cash for, e.g., a surprise medical bill.

Repayment of a loan meets the strict mathematical definition of "savings" however it is typically excluded (as are, e.g., investments). For instance, the U.S. calculation of GDP does not consider repayment to be saving.

Savings are typically held in checking accounts, savings accounts, CDs, and money market accounts. Some people take a portion of their savings and invest them in higher risk items like stocks and bonds, but those are investments.

It's important to decouple the concepts of net worth (or even just worth) from the concept of "savings" because you can be taking actions that increase net worth (e.g. paying a mortgage) that don't increase one's savings. (Though, eventually, if you sell the home you could put any proceeds into savings.)

randomdata
4 replies
3h12m

> You can have savings and still be underwater.

You wouldn't have savings in the house, but it is possible you have savings elsewhere, sure. However, if you are not underwater (or breaking even), you do have savings in the house, which is what the context speaks to specifically.

> Yes, money saved into a home is an asset that you are building over time. However it's a non liquid asset

There is nothing about savings that implies they must be liquid. If you are saving for a near-term purchase then savings for all practical purposes need be liquid, sure, but if you are young and saving for retirement liquidity is not of terrible importance. You have many decades in front of you to convert it into something else.

> Savings are typically held in checking accounts, savings accounts, CDs, and money market accounts.

Okay, but then we're again back to people not having savings because the returns have generally been poor, even basically non-existent in many cases, for a long, long time. Why would most people have savings in that kind of environment? The market has greatly incentivized surpluses to look elsewhere – especially towards real estate, where returns have been tremendous.

> It's important to decouple the concepts of net worth (or even just worth) from the concept of "savings"

That's for the earlier commenter to decide. It is not on us to prescribe their usage of a term. However, insofar as our discussion goes, it there is no such importance as we have already looked at both angles. No matter which direction you choose to go, the math doesn't add up with the presentation.

yareal
3 replies
2h57m

There is nothing about savings that implies they must be liquid.

Here are several examples that disagree. Yes, in a strict Keynesian economic sense it is saving but saving is different from savings, despite the similarity in the two words. (Yes, you are right, this is confusing.)

Examples defining "savings" in personal finance:

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/savings.asp

"Savings is essentially cash"

https://www.britannica.com/money/saving

"Saving may take the form of increases in bank deposits, purchases of securities, or increased cash holdings."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saving

"In terms of personal finance, saving generally specifies low-risk preservation of money, as in a deposit account, versus investment, wherein risk is a lot higher."

randomdata
2 replies
2h49m

> Here are several examples that disagree.

Disagree with what? I fail to see the difference from definition two.

It does not match definition one, of course, but that had to exist in an effort to be fair to the original commenter. It is not like you are going to go in like a horribly confused idiot and randomly redefine tillage or something. If the OP is using savings in the sense of the positive net value of a home, rationally one will be accommodating to that.

But it doesn't really matter what definition you choose. The math doesn't add up to what was presented under any definition.

yareal
1 replies
2h26m

The original poster is correct, the majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. With no savings (in the personal finance sense).

Example: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/living-paycheck-to-pa...

What's challenging for you about these numbers? Your original response included mortgages in saving, which is atypical. If you exclude mortgages, which is typical, do the numbers make more sense?

It is not like you are going to go in like a horribly confused idiot and randomly redefine tillage or something.

Try to remain on topic and avoid ad hominem, please.

randomdata
0 replies
2h17m

> The original poster is correct

Seemingly not, else we'd have seen the math already. Also,

1. Not having savings (in the personal finance sense) does not mean one is living paycheque to paycheque.

2. The article you link to defines living paycheck to paycheck as a scenario where the family income does not cover expenses. Principal repayment is not an expense. Outside of the 1-2% with interest-only mortgages, anyone who is paying a mortgage cannot be living paycheck to paycheck under the definition you have given. They must have surpluses over and above expenses in order to do so.

Again, the math does seem to work in that sense if you include children. But is there some reason we should be aware of newborns not making enough money to save?

> Try to remain on topic and avoid ad hominem, please.

1. It is on-topic. It explains why multiple definitions are present.

2. Ad homiem implies being directed at a person. The statement is not directed at a person.

izacus
1 replies
1d3h

What's the statistical relevancy of your "everyone I know" sample for US population in general?

Are people you know of different ages, social classes, races, upbringings and living locations to capture the sentiment of population?

Or are they all well off people in a few rich areas?

AbstractH24
0 replies
22h10m

They are concentrated in a major metro area that was among the worst affected by the pandemic in America. They span many ages, social classes, races, upbringings, and jobs, from tech to blue-collar union work.

Be that as it may, my point is that the possibility exists and is almost equally as likely. Not that it is correct.

ponector
7 replies
1d4h

The answer is simple. Some consumers are feeling terrible and they are vocal about it. People mostly are ok and not talking about it.

citizen_friend
2 replies
1d4h

Alternative theory: the metrics don’t describe our full economic experience.

uoaei
1 replies
1d2h

That's literally the point of the article.

citizen_friend
0 replies
22h33m

Yes.

nothercastle
1 replies
1d3h

The metrics are likely comparing 2020 item and 2024 item and assuming it’s the same thing but the manufacturer cleverly gutted the 2024 item of all quality parts and just kept the name

wholinator2
0 replies
1d3h

While also cleverly raising the price 50-200% during covid and then cleverly never lowering it back to normal once the supply chains started working

harimau777
1 replies
1d4h

Even if that's the case, that's a problem. First, it's bad for society to write people off. Are people going to be willing to contribute if they aren't sure whether they might be the next write off? Second, a small number of disenfranchised people can still cause a lot of problems if they get despirate.

pixl97
0 replies
1d2h

I mean, this is true. And these days these people don't even need to be real. Kick off a few hundred thousand bots along with a visible ad campaign corresponding with how bad things are and you can get the people in the "not great, not terrible" camp thinking the end of the world is here.

carlosjobim
7 replies
1d4h

Our method for understanding the economy is flawed

There is no misunderstanding. In the Soviet Union, the rulers and their media would every day report on how fantastical the economy was doing and how production was beating records etc. Get used, because this will continue for the rest of your life.

chii
6 replies
1d2h

But there was shortages of everything in the USSR.

What shortages are there in the US?

mperham
4 replies
1d1h

Try to get an appointment to see a doctor.

Food deserts.

lotsoweiners
3 replies
1d1h

Try to get an appointment to see a doctor

Done this literally dozens of times over the past couple of years for myself, kids, and wife and have never had an issue. Even been offered appointments same or next day. Am I missing something?

Izkata
1 replies
1d

Are you urban, suburban, or rural?

Something I've been suspicious of for a while now, the farther from the cities the worse it is. Grocery prices, for example, didn't start rising in the city I'm in until a year or more after I started seeing people complaining about it, and a good chunk of them were suburban or rural.

lotsoweiners
0 replies
21h16m

Suburban

GOD_Over_Djinn
0 replies
23h36m

Good for you. I had to wait 5 months to see a specialist.

trashface
0 replies
16h39m

You have perhaps read that some people in a few places are having troubles with housing or rent?

sodality2
4 replies
1d4h

This is related to a phenomenon that writer Kyla Scanlon has called the “vibecession” - a disconnect between the economy’s metrics deemed to indicate its health, and the general populace’s perception of it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibecession

1oooqooq
3 replies
1d1h

that is not a thing and that page will probably be gone soon.

that is at most an attempt to control the narrative, and throw the growing inequality under the rug as some sort of mass hysteria. lame.

sodality2
2 replies
1d1h

It is literally explicitly addressing the situation where these indicators claim everything's okay even though no one feels like it is - the idea that just because economic health metrics are up, doesn't mean anything for the average American.

1oooqooq
1 replies
14h52m

it's actually saying the opposite.

it's claims is that everything really is better, but the "vibe" is to complain. it's a counter to the "silent majority" suffering in red states. it's a inane political spin that did not take on.

sodality2
0 replies
8h3m

I just don’t even know where you’re getting this from. I have to wonder if you’ve read the original article. If that’s what you got from the wikipedia page, it’s wrong - I have Scanlon’s book in my hand and here’s a quote straight from the vibecession chapter

“Of course, as I have talked about throughout the book, there are many real problems with the economy. We have a structural affordability crisis. A housing crisis. A healthcare crisis. A childcare crisis. The list is endless and nothing can hide anymore. The things to be anxious about are numerous. The geopolitical warfare. The walls of any sense of economic safety caving in. The endless political theatrics.”

And here’s a quote from the source document that coined the term vibecession, from her Substack:

Markets are a profit-maximizing system. That is the point of All of This - the reason that people feel bad, the reason that the vibes are off, part of the reason that people get fired, companies go under, that McKinsey incentivized the opioid crisis - they knew it would kill people, but it would make money. Money is not a moral compass.

How is this claiming that everything’s actually okay and that it’s just that we’re sad about stuff? If the claim was “the vibe is to complain” why did she give at least ten real problems that influence consumer sentiment there.

owlstuffing
3 replies
1d4h

Not that economics is a credible science, but you’re conflating talking heads with economists. Talking heads exist to peddle the agenda of the elites who own them.

1oooqooq
2 replies
1d2h

who do you think economists also listen to?

braiamp
1 replies
1d1h

I hope they listen to data. Either that they gather themselves or gathered by reputable organizations. Consumer confidence index for example tries to gather the sentiment of the consumers.

1oooqooq
0 replies
14h49m

data says whatever you want it to. nobody will ever make a model that is devoid of personal interest. even your example just measure how bad a product can be for maximum profit. i.e. buying ten disposables is better than one good product.

where t f people got that holy image of economists?

robotcapital
2 replies
1d4h

Part of the problem is that that “intuition” changes based on how you the ask the question and who you ask it to. A good example of this is polling that shows Americans as a whole believe the country’s finances will be worse off a year from now at twice the rate as their own personal finances[0]. So I’d argue that even anecdotes and intuition need to be taken with grain of salt, particularly given that it’s an election year with a polarized electorate.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/05/23/views-of-the...

pixl97
1 replies
1d2h

polarized electorate

And I would add with a polarized media whos parent companies fortunes depend on which people get elected. The amount of corporate financed propaganda out there is out of control.

robotcapital
0 replies
1d

We’re getting off on a tangent here about here about the mechanism behind that polarization, but it reflects the broader point I was trying to make with my comment. That is to be skeptical of simplistic answer, like “economic termites” or “corporate propaganda”, to complex topics like the economy or polarization. It might imply an agenda other than seeking the truth.

CoastalCoder
2 replies
1d4h

Some factors on my list of sentiment drags:

* Manufacturers reducing product quality without buyers' knowledge. E.g., Pyrex or some SSD makers.

* Shrinkflation: grocery stores selling slightly smaller-sized packages without buyers' knowledge. E.g., containers that used to be square, staying equally wide (for shelf space facing) but less deep.

* Widespread Terms and Conditions / EULAs that undermine previously reliable consumer protections.

* The sense that privacy-preserving products are now out of my financial reach, due to surveillance capitalism.

I guess the main pattern in these things is a sense of failed consumer protections.

EDIT: I'm ranting about consumer sentiment, which is probably different from economic sentiment. Apologies for going off topic.

pbhjpbhj
0 replies
1d3h

Yes, product changes should be logged IMO so that customers can access that information. Companies essentially pass off a new product as the old product now, lying to consumers. Capitalism relies on informed customers to target purchases towards the 'best' products; this breaks that ability. VC firms seem to buy well-established companies, reduce the quality and ride them into the ground, destroying a lot of value that has built up over a long time. Rinse-and-repeat and the overall value of products goes down. This is a point for government to require a detailed account of products.

It shouldn't be a mystery whether shrinkflation has occurred it should say it right on the product, and be confirmed in a government verified database.

In the UK it feels more like corrupted consumer protections. I suppose that's a type of failed, but it's not because the consumer protections were bad, it's because they were removed by a government who work for (or just are) the capitalists rather than the demos.

nothercastle
0 replies
1d3h

I see a lot of stuff decrease in quality and increase in price. Just this year 2024 bikes in the 2k range now are shipping with garage tier SRAM groups instead of last year where they had Shimannos. If you want to good stuff it’s 2700 now. Paying more for less is a real drag

kjellsbells
1 replies
1d4h

Two fine examples of this myopia are the basket of items that economists and government statisticians use to calculate inflation rates, and the nature of the jobs that are considered to measure labor force participation. Or perhaps more strictly, the metrics that those groups put out that the media choose to report on. CPI isnt always the best metric and something like healthcare costs are better tracked in the PCE metric. So you get this situation where CPI says "not bad, boys" and the consumers have a wildly different point of view.

For labor participation, full employment is not great if everyone is working crappy jobs. I dont know if there are better metrics buried in the government's output, but it perhaps would be more in keeping with lived experience to track participation with dependence on supplemental sources of income. if you need a second job, or charity/government help, just to survive, then you dont have a "living job". That sort of thing isnt captured by LFP stats.

To be clear, I do trust the govt stats in places like the UK and US. I just think they are measuring the wrong things.

CoastalCoder
0 replies
1d3h

Could someone explain why the parent comment is down voted?

I don't notice anything off about it.

bwanab
1 replies
1d

The personal experience of the economy isn't quite as you make it. In polls, people do complain about the national economy being in terrible shape, but by a fairly good margin report that their own finances are in good shape. It's hard to weave a coherent narrative from those contradictory data.

enraged_camel
0 replies
1d

This discrepancy is easy to explain. My personal finances are quite fine but I have a LOT of friends who have to make a living doing several gig jobs. Said friends are, on paper, employed, and are getting by. But they are quite miserable: stressed, overworked, no leisure time and no benefits.

That’s why the article author is correct that macro stats aren’t good at capturing the quality of the lived experiences of people - just the quantities.

braiamp
1 replies
1d1h

economists unduly focus on a few metrics of dubious quality

Which is funny, because as economist, half of the material is "these metric don't matter, if there's no benefit for the population, but you can't ignore them either". It can be summarized as something like "economic indicators are not perfect measures of general well-being, but you need the indicators to look good to be able to distribute well-being".

The thing is, that the public doesn't get that _nuance_. Good economist know that a growing GPD doesn't mean that everyone is feeling good, but also knows that a shrinking one means that most will fell bad.

creer
0 replies
22h56m

So perhaps economists need to work on this "comm" issue. At least the ones involved in government stats. "It's not their job" only if they actively make it not their job.

I ran into this with NASA. A NASA "scientist" insisted it was proper for them and their colleagues to ignore both valid and crackpot suggestions or questions on the rationale that "crackpots are gonna crackpot and they have limited time so the proper response was to just ignore everyone and everything except their (collectively) narrow research projects." - Which are each extremely specific and grounded in massive piles of internal assumptions as to what matters. There was zero interest in the idea that they were paid by the public and might want to improve their image now and then.

tuatoru
0 replies
1d

Just listened to a podcast that pointed out that housing is expensive, education is expensive, childcare is expensive, cars are expensive, and money is expensive (interest rates are high). And out of pocket expenses for healthcare are going up and up.

Economists don't have a handle on the compromises and adaptations that people have been making over the last decade or more, e.g. moving to the cheaper place further out of town rather than where they want to live, or house-sharing rather than living as a couple.

It seems people are at the limit of the adaptations they can make and are pretty pissed off about it.

rapjr9
0 replies
14h25m

So I was just buying some electronic components on eBay and noticed that once again Chinese product sellers (and their US resellers) lie, cheat and poison US customers. This 100W solar panel for $12.99 is actually 5W:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/165973941939

The pictures all prominently say "100W". The specs says output of 5V 2A (10W). The specs also say max output of 5V 1A (5W). It is nowhere near 100W. Customer rating of the seller is 99.1%. People expect to be lied to? I've been buying lots of stuff, both professionally and personally for many years and this has been a concerning trend. China is selling us childrens toys that contain lead paint and lead based solder in electronics. Laser pointers that can easily blind you labeled as safe at 5mW but really have no IR filter (to cut costs) so they output 50 to 150mW which people can't see and which can invisibly blind them. Electrical products that are not UL certified and are not safely designed (there are teardown channels on Youtube where they take apart products and they'll find AC powered stuff where the ground line is left hanging loose inside, not connected to anything). And our government lets this happen, has been letting this happen for decades. Ebay profits from it. No one is held accountable. What happened to law? Like Truth In Advertising? What happened to UL listing? What happened to fraud prevention? Our government is not fulfilling it's function. Crime is rampant and obvious. This is an obvious and serious failure of government. China is cheating US customers (and Chinese customers also apparently), and is poisoning and harming us. Seems like an absolutely real Chinese plot to attack democracy and it is working and our government is letting it happen. Why? Because "cheap stuff"? eBay profits? I think people see this kind of thing and think that there is no rule of law any more, which influences them and corrupts their behavior as well. Everybody is doing it, so they think they should also. Any thoughts about this? It seems to have been a gradual loosening of standards. It's happened across the business world, in government and in policing. The police won't investigate a crime unless it involves more than $10,000 or harms a person. Business advice for startups is to "fake it until you make it". Hospitals will charge people without insurance 20 times the normal price. Corporations considered fines for breaking the law the cost of doing business. Private equity "extracts value" by destroying companies. It seems like everyone has given up and corruption rules the day and everyone has to watch out for themselves. Are there just too many people now making the world too complex to oversee? Maybe these systems have never worked because they rely on most people complying and a lot of people now cheat? Maybe the internet/web makes it too easy to start a new company identity if reputation is lost? Have corporations captured government and hollowed out law? The level of lawlessness seems to have grown a lot; corporations, government departments, and police agencies all often just disregard demands from higher up for accountability and say they refuse to provide requested data. Go ahead and sue them and they'll pay the fine (years from now), continue doing it, and pass the costs on.

jprete
0 replies
1d5h

They're addicted to metrics instead of observation. Anything that isn't easily measured is considered to not exist, including how people feel about it.

Now that I think about it, that's literal selection pressure for psychopathy.

hehdhdjehehegwv
0 replies
1d1h

My theory is the pandemic exposed the bear minimum people will accept and society won’t collapse.

Companies learned the true baseline of what they can get away with and we’re in a new permanent reality of everything sucking right up to the exact line where it would collapse of it sucked more.

hanniabu
0 replies
1d3h

is not properly capturing what all consumers know

Yeah because every time a metric looks bad it gets adjusted to look better either by changing the weights or removing items from the calculation which dilutes it's effectiveness

cyanydeez
0 replies
1d4h

Welath inequality means many companies just dont need the majority of consumers. Big pharma typifies his by increasing prices till they can just get a few whales to buy.

The rental market and the.dojs anti trust is the same: landlorsa making money by limiting units to just the more wealth renters and leaving units empty.

This is just qhat.happens wgen regulatots simply stop enforcing a minimum level of social goods.

JumpCrisscross
0 replies
1d4h

method for understanding the economy is flawed and is not properly capturing what all consumers know intuitively

It’s not flawed, economic literacy in the general population just sucks and thus so does the popular discourse. The closer you are to the minimum wage or tech sector, the worse you’re doing; the more you make and more assets you have the better you’re doing [1].

The measures are there. They show a bifurcating economy, and in particular, one fracturing along social lines, thereby inhibiting information permeation. They’re just buried in e.g. the Fed’s Beige Books, which aren’t consumed as vociferously as TV news.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/economic-data-paint-a-...

Fauntleroy
0 replies
1d4h

Those at the top of the chain, who benefit from the "strong" economy, have an intrinsic motivation to suggest that things are going just great. Many in Washington are either suckling the teats of the wealthy through campaign finance / lobbying, or hyper-rich from investments (and other forms of economic parasitism)—providing a great deal of motivation for decision makers in US government to not give a shit.

CuriouslyC
0 replies
1d3h

The vibecession isn't totally wrong, there are a lot of paradoxes you hear when you ask people about how they're doing vs how other people are doing, Paul Krugman has covered this a bit.

The middle class and up is doing well, basically anyone who has mortgage debt and a white collar job. Lower classes were doing well due to pandemic wage gains, but inflation and housing prices have now outpaced those.

Animats
57 replies
1d

Four.

That's the magic number. There have to be four competitors of significant size before prices go down. There are both EU and US studies substantiating this. It's been seen in cellular phone networks, ISPs, drugstores, and banks. Drop below the threshold of four, and the magic happens. Prices go up, margins go up, and consumers lose.

Four should be the basis of antitrust policy. Less than four, and there are two options - break up, or become a regulated public utility.

Two or three isn't enough. Collusion happens. Explicitly or implicitly, price competition doesn't happen with only two or three players. Four seems to be enough that cartels usually break up on their own. Somebody won't play ball.

Four.

jmyeet
18 replies
22h6m

Speaking generally, not to you specifically, it seems like a ton of people see the problems created by capitalism and decide the solution is even more capitalism.

I don't think there's a magical number of competitors that fixes things. We see an interesting phenomenon in commercial landlords where we have a ton of players but they all use the same software [1], which creates an effective monopoly even though it's not a classical monopoly.

The problems we see in so many sectors were accurately described in the 1800s by just analyzing the workers relationships to the means of production. Internet access is a textbook cexample. National ISPs should not exist. They are rent-seeking parasites. The best Internet is in places with municipal broadband.

It's just not feasible or economical to have 4+ broadband networks being built in an area. [1]: https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r...

WalterBright
16 replies
21h53m

It's just not feasible or economical to have 4+ broadband networks being built in an area

Actually, it is. When telephone systems were invented, lots of telephone companies sprang up and ran wires everywhere. The barrier to this happening with broadband is regulation. Regulators work hard to ensure there is no broadband competition.

it seems like a ton of people see the problems created by capitalism and decide the solution is even more capitalism.

I find that rather funny, as most people see the solution to failed government programs is expanding those programs. Anyone who wants to cut back such failures cannot get elected.

lovich
6 replies
21h30m

When telephone systems were invented, lots of telephone companies sprang up and ran wires everywhere.

They did and cities ended up looking like this http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--91pqSjxr...

There is not enough space to dedicate to electrical and internet wiring with a competition model like this. The physical space is a natural monopoly. What should be done is to treat the wiring as a utility but allow for unlimited competition on the actual service, which is how the UK operates their internet service iirc

WalterBright
5 replies
18h15m

Which proves my point. It was not cost that prevents multiple sets of wires being laid. It's regulation, and frankly rather poor management by the government.

For example, a road nearby was widened for bike lanes. While they were at it, a trench was dug before the repaving to enlarge the water/sewer pipes. I emailed the people in charge that they should consider burying the power lines, too. The power lines ran on telephone poles along the road, and the poles were festooned with wires. The power lines regularly get dismantled by trees and wind storms. Laying wire in an existing trench is cheap as dirt. Digging a trench and laying wire and repaving costs about a million dollars a mile (I was told this a few years ago by a power employee).

The reply I received was they'd already made the plans and couldn't be bothered.

lovich
4 replies
14h24m

Which proves my point. It was not cost that prevents multiple sets of wires being laid. It's regulation, and frankly rather poor management by the government.

Do you look at the picture I linked, and think this is a preferable end state over some extra regulatory cost? That you would rather have those sets of cables all over the place and think the government is preventing this better state?

If you do, that's an opinion you can have, but I also think we have fundamentally different views of the world.

WalterBright
2 replies
13h40m

Do you look at the picture I linked, and think this is a preferable end state over some extra regulatory cost? That you would rather have those sets of cables all over the place and think the government is preventing this better state?

Yes, I saw the picture. It means it is not prohibitively expensive to run multiple wires.

Yes, it is unsightly. But there are many, many ways to run multiple signals today. Technology has advanced a great deal. For example, one trench or pipe can provide space for a large number of wires. The community can provide a pipe for such purposes, like they provide pipes for other purposes. Or the providers can agree to share a wire. Or use microwaves. Or the cell towers. Or Starlink. And on and on.

vineyardmike
1 replies
10h55m

For example, one trench or pipe can provide space for a large number of wires. The community can provide a pipe for such purposes, like they provide pipes for other purposes.

Congrats on describing municipal broadband while arguing against government involvement.

Gormo
0 replies
1h59m

Nothing in the preceding comment remotely resembles any proposal for municipal broadband. Even if a municipal government were doing the work he assigns to "the community", that work consists of maintaining a system of conduit within which other parties can run their own fiber lines connected to their own networks, and wouldn't at all imply that the municipality would own or operate any of the physical network infrastructure, nor operate ISP services.

And there's no necessity that role of "the community" be handed off to a municipal government, either. People can and do solve complex coordination problems without relying on political authority all the time -- "the community" could easily be a non-profit organization, a mutual owned by local residents, or just a series of reciprocal agreements to maintain the baseline infrastructure needed for other parties to run cables, without any municipal government being involved.

The idea that any non-trivial coordination problem can only be solved by centralized political authority is one of the principal drivers of corruption and stagnation in modern society, and is itself one of the main causes of competitive markets degenerating into monopolies or oligopolies.

Gormo
0 replies
2h9m

Do you look at the picture I linked, and think this is a preferable end state over some extra regulatory cost?

Alternatively, we can dispense with the false dichotomy (along with the presumption that the technical constraints of 19th-century telegraph lines are applicable to modern telecom) and identify ways to incentivize competitive markets without dealing with externaliies by imposing regulatory barriers that ultimately generate oligopolies.

OTOH, the modern version of your picture would probably consist of dozens of fiber lines all running through the same network of underground conduit, so the most direct answer to your question is "yes, absolutely".

nitwit005
5 replies
21h7m

That sort of industry gets regulated because letting people build multiple incompatible networks is an extremely expensive thing to do.

The railways often built incompatible tracks, signaling systems, and so forth, which was a problem nation's still struggle with.

Power companies created incompatible systems. Japan is famous for running on two incompatible electrical grids to this day.

WalterBright
4 replies
18h2m

There are enormous economic forces that push for standardization. For example, your keyboard is likely connected via USB. USB isn't a government standard. Neither is Standard C. And endless other things that the market standardized. Even 2*4 lumber is standardized. Gasoline is standardized. And so on.

Power companies created incompatible systems.

They're usually granted government monopolies.

sudosysgen
1 replies
14h1m

Ever since the iPhone, USB stopped being an actual standard to connect accessories to computers, until it became a (EU) government standard.

It is actually a great example to the opposite. The history of USB as a connector is of a direct consequence of the IBM PC, itself a standard. The only reason USB became a widespread standard is that there was a widespread standard computer and, as we see today with many other forms of computers, that is largely an accident : smartphones do not have a widespread standard, neither do gaming consoles, etc...

WalterBright
0 replies
13h38m

The IBM PC was never a government standard.

nitwit005
1 replies
16h42m

And yet somehow those incompatible telephone systems, rail systems, power systems, and everything else all came into existence.

USB is widely highlighted as an unusual success. But Apple has notably created their own incompatible connectors, and made money that way, which is why Europe is busy forcing a charging standard.

Gasoline is very obviously government regulated. 2 by 4s are only sort of standardized.

WalterBright
0 replies
13h33m

Gasoline is very obviously government regulated.

The chemical makeup of it? The government banned tetra ethyl lead in it, and mandated some ethanol in it, but the rest is various mixes made by the gas companies.

2 by 4s are only sort of standardized.

I've bought 2 by 4s for most of my life. They're a standard size.

jmyeet
1 replies
19h29m

Let's say it costs $1000 to bring fiber to each household in a given network build. The take up rate might be 35%. That is 35% of connected households become customers. Well that customer has to recoupe $3000 to pay for that build.

Now imagine there are 2 last mile networks. The take up rate hasn't changed. If they cost the same then each customer has to recoup $6000.

Network overbuilds make absolutely no sense.

Government programs don't fail per se. They're designed to fail by underfunding them or adding layers of administration (eg state block grants to replace direct Federal funding) and then that failure is used to justify more cuts. It's called starving the beast [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

WalterBright
0 replies
18h1m

Network overbuilds make absolutely no sense.

You could say the same about any competition. And yet the evidence that competition reduces prices is enormous.

chomskyole
0 replies
13h17m

Regulators work hard to ensure there is no broadband competition.

Regulators can be the tool to stifle competition. The driver though is inherent in business needs. Competition is the biggest cost to any business, so there will always be a drive to reduce the competition to as close to zero as possible. It's inherent in how businesses operate.

Gormo
0 replies
2h13m

Speaking generally, not to you specifically, it seems like a ton of people see the problems created by capitalism and decide the solution is even more capitalism.

"Capitalism" is a descriptive model, not an entity with causal agency. Everything boils down to the intentions and actions of the human beings involved, and those do not change by paying lip service to a different body of abstract dogma.

To the extent that "capitalism" accurately describes the structural incentives and constraints inherent in the reality that these problems are manifesting in, then there is nothing other than "even more capitalism" on the table as a solution.

Problems can only be solved from within the world that generates them -- there is no "outside", as devotees of various dogmas often mistakenly think.

alexpetralia
13 replies
22h40m

How about Uber vs. Lyft, for example? Do you think there is competitive pricing here?

fire_lake
12 replies
22h37m

- they compete with local taxi firms

- they compete with other modes of transport

- prices have risen substantially after the VC land grab tailed off

WalterBright
11 replies
21h59m

Prices have also risen substantially after the government began legislating driver pay.

JKCalhoun
5 replies
21h56m

It's like there was never a business model there then. Well, in a first world country anyway.

johnnyanmac
4 replies
21h31m

For my area in Los Angeles, it wasn't viable because everyone (or someone you know) has a car. a friend ride is much cheaper than an Uber.

I only download the Uber app when I need to get to the airport and am leaving for weeks at a time. Any other time, I take myself, ask a friend, or even consider what remnants we have of public transportation (e.g. instead of taking a horribly expensive uber in/out of LAX, take a shuttle to some smaller area and then hitch a ride. can easily save 4x the cost for a $5 bus ride and maybe 30-45 extra minutes)

rblatz
1 replies
21h8m

That seems like a lot of effort, planning, and time to save $20.

johnnyanmac
0 replies
16h59m

Try $150. Trying to Uber out of LAX is highway robbery and they know that. Going from my house to LAX is anywhere from $60-100. Going the other way is anywhere from $100-300, and only gets worse on holidays.

Shuttle to anywhere else is $10 and prices become normal again. Best advice I ever got. That and trying to use other airports where possible.

EasyMark
1 replies
17h5m

A lot of us won’t ask friends for rides because it’s kind of selfish, I’ll do an uber/lyft every time unless my buddy is right there saying he’s heading that way.

johnnyanmac
0 replies
16h57m

Well I have my car and we tend to alternate carpools, so there's not usually any pressure. I tend to give them $10-20 to cover gas and I still come out way ahead.

I just never get a good time to go to/leave an airport, so that's the only time I resort to Uber.

vineyardmike
1 replies
10h58m

Next you're going to tell me health and safety laws increase prices?

What about environmental protections?

Do you think that drivers licenses increased prices too? What about vehicle safety and inspection standards?

fire_lake
0 replies
9h45m

Not OP but they definitely do increase prices - they are still a good idea though; externalities must be kept in check.

johnnyanmac
1 replies
21h34m

I sure wish they did more. My dang state passed Prop 22: https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_22,_App-Based...

App-Based Drivers as Contractors and Labor Policies Initiative (2020)

Sad part is it wasn't even close. Guess capitalism still can buy votes, even ones that work against your best interests as a working class.

WalterBright
0 replies
18h0m

Nobody ever made anyone become an Uber driver.

Manuel_D
0 replies
19h39m

...when the government legislated pay is over $26 per hour. Plenty of business would see higher prices with business-specific pay legislation mandating pay substantially higher than minimum wage.

mensetmanusman
7 replies
22h0m

How many more humans would be needed to support 4 of every company type?

saulpw
3 replies
21h46m

None, if each of the companies were 1/4 of the size.

cjblomqvist
2 replies
21h20m

Not necessarily true. Economies of scale is a thing.

saulpw
0 replies
19h51m

Up to a point. Beyond that point, "economies of scale" becomes "monopolies of scale". Which is Stoller's (and the OP's) point.

Dalewyn
0 replies
20h15m

This. More, smaller companies mean more duplication and overhead which can manifest in higher prices. One of the biggest factors behind market consolidation and centralization is because it reduces duplication and overhead which can increase margins and might reduce prices.

Merely increasing competition doesn't necessarily drive prices down.

EasyMark
1 replies
17h3m

Tell me one industry that couldn’t be chopped up into 4 or more corporations? I think you will be hard pressed to come up with one.

adgjlsfhk1
0 replies
12h59m

EUV machines. total demand seems to be <20 per year and developing each generation is a billion dollar effort

primax
0 replies
20h0m

The same amount.

The 4 companies are competing for their share of the existing business

sologoub
4 replies
19h8m

Four.

Interestingly, the US cell phone industry would seem competitive - major players (Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile) and a bunch of smaller and/or regional players including the incumbent telcos like xfinity and spectrum. Then you dig a little deeper and see that all that “competition” runs on the towers of one of the three and unlike with the reform of British Telecom (BT), there are no requirements for this infra to be offered at any kind of lower price or at cost enabling competition for the last mile service.

sanex
3 replies
18h20m

5 years ago or so I had T-Mobile for $50/month unlimited everything. I switched off and just went back for $170 for a phone for my wife and I. To pretend to be comparable on a per line basis they gave me a phone number that I literally could not refuse. Before they bought Sprint we had the magic 4 but now it's 3 and a bunch of resellers.

sologoub
0 replies
16h8m

4 is still an oligopoly[1]. It’s a little better than 3, but we didn’t have super cheap cell plans. Compared with most of the rest of the world, it was still quite expensive.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly

listenallyall
0 replies
2h5m

3 and a bunch of resellers.

You just explained why prices went up - not because Sprint exited, but because the market bifurcated into prepaid and postpaid. You can get unlimited everything on T-Mobile's network from Mint, for about $30 per month. You just have to pay up front, and you have to bring your own phone. The "majors" have raised prices on 1- and 2- line plans because they are positioning themselves as a premium product especially for families and groups with lots of lines. No point in competing to a race to the bottom vs Mint, Cricket, Metro, etc.

dlachausse
0 replies
2h51m

Sprint was not going to survive. They were circling the drain and needed to be acquired to be rescued. I was a customer of theirs and they could literally only compete on price. T-mobile wasn’t in much better shape. Post merger the improvement in network quality and customer service has been night and day. Sprint owned tons of spectrum but was terrible at using it. T-mobile was spectrum starved and would not have the network they have today without purchasing Sprint.

Sprint literally bet on the wrong technology every single generation. They also had trouble getting many popular phones because they used such oddball network technology.

roenxi
3 replies
20h3m

Four should be the basis of antitrust policy. Less than four, and there are two options - break up, or become a regulated public utility.

3 options; usually monopolies are matched by regulatory constraints making competition expensive. Removing the barriers to other firms entering the market is always an option.

HWR_14
2 replies
19h52m

I'm not sure of many, if any, monopolies where regulatory constraints are the cause. Especially compared to causes like network effects. Do you have a modern example?

I can think of a couple of examples where regulations exist to manage other constraints on competition, like the FCC regulating the spectrum. But not where the regulations cause the number of major competitors to decrease dramatically.

roenxi
1 replies
18h37m

One example I like is Internet Explorer. IE had a "monopoly" back in the early 2000s and made up something like 90% of the browser market. Then Firefox came along and broke the market open, then Google and Apple rolled in like bulldozers [0] and we got to a healthy 4-player market.

Everywhere except for South Korea. You can still read articles on it to this day [1]. Regulations had an unfortunate interaction that made IE into the only option and set up an actual monopoly situation.

The caveat is I personally think monopoly is called far too quickly; as far as I can tell every successful product is a monopoly to someone on HN. A lot of the things people want to call monopolies aren't, they are markets like the browser market that haven't finished settling. Unfortunately they can become ossified due to bad regulatory practice.

[0] What Steve Jobs did to Flash should come with 18+ violence content warnings. They were the days. Nothing could be done about that scourge until suddenly something had been done.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/business/korea-internet-e...

HWR_14
0 replies
4h3m

IE didn't lose in the market when Firefox came along. IE lost when the government fined Microsoft billions of dollars and forced it to relinquish it's monopoly position.

Meanwhile the current market is Chrome, reskinned Chrome and Safari. Hardly a healthy marketplace.

gruez
1 replies
22h36m

That's the magic number. There have to be four competitors of significant size before prices go down. There are both EU and US studies substantiating this.

source?

Animats
0 replies
19h48m

"Entry and Competition in Concentrated Markets" [1]

This is a paper from 1991, from some economists at Stanford. They say the key number is between 3 and 5. This was a study of smaller businesses in small towns - doctors, dentists, druggists, plumbers, and tire dealers.

"Competition Policy Brief (2021)" An EU study.[2] This is much more of a macro study.

"How European Markets Became Free: A Study of Institutional Drift"[3] This one compares US and EU antitrust policy changes over time, especially for telecom and airlines.

There's overall agreement that trouble begins below 5 competitors.

[1] https://www.its.caltech.edu/~mshum/gradio/papers/bresreiss_j...

[2] https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2021-12...

[3] http://germangutierrezg.com/GutierrezPhilippon_Europe_2020.p...

User23
1 replies
21h9m

How then do you explain the Silicon Valley wage price fixing scandal? There were more than four players there.

EasyMark
0 replies
17h4m

It’s a statistic, not an absolute, obviously 4 is probably the minimum. It’s a rule of thumb and there to say “2 or 3 probably isn’t enough, it takes at least 4 AND government oversight” otherwise, uh, capitalism finds a way [to cheat]

o1o1o1
0 replies
22h21m

Can you please share some sources on this?

I was thinking about this when I saw that UAE only has du and e& which both don't provide the best customer service to formulate it nicely and prices which they could not ask for if they had to compete with their EU counterparts.

chomskyole
0 replies
13h3m

I have heard similar things anecdotally, though my own work experience wouldn't confirm this. Could you point to any sources for this?

boringg
0 replies
20h34m

Cant wait for somehow the government to require four companies in order to ensure good competition by some well intentioned poorly reasoned and executed policies.

doe_eyes
35 replies
1d4h

What I find odd about the article is that it does very little to substantiate its core claim - that the reason the economy is broken are small monopolists-but-not-really-monopolists who are trying to fleece you.

It opens with the example of rising construction costs. The only remotely relevant example here is Autodesk, but by the article's own admission, "the cost of these products remains relatively minor". And that's an overstatement: they are negligible. I guess Assa Abloy is another example, but really - mini-monopolist power? It's one of countless lock manufacturers. You can buy Schlage, Kwikset, ABUS...

In fact, no serious study of the construction industry pins cost increases on stuff like that. There are far more powerful factors at play. The laborers you hire want to be paid more than before (and the government is rising minimum wages). Compliance is getting costlier due to ever-evolving building codes, environmental and energy regulations, and zoning. Customer expectations are increasing (higher finish, more sqft). To the extent the materials are getting expensive, it's usually not your lumber mill being greedy.

I don't expect every opinion piece to offer irrefutable proofs, but there is really no effort to build a case for that claim at all.

Plus, I think the article falls for the classic trap of "rising prices are not inflation, it's <something else I don't like>".

reaperman
18 replies
1d4h

The areas I might agree with this for construction would be something like lumbermills - where we have plenty of timber available but there’s a bottleneck of capital for mill capacity and they’ve been able to raise prices sharply in the past few years. Investors don’t want to pay to build enough capacity to bring prices down because then only older paid-off mills would win a pricing war if there were any excess capacity.

tomrod
17 replies
1d4h

Economic theory asserts that where there is profit to be made you will find entrants. So unless something stops entrants for mills (ie funding availability) we should anticipate economic profits to decrease.

nothercastle
10 replies
1d3h

Eventually maybe but the Capitol investment is high and only a few firms are in the market place who are capable of playing. If they enter they expand they will decrease their own margins and that’s generally not desirable. Why take risks if you don’t have to and you can live out your tenure as ceo collect big bucks and Retire without any. Everyone wants to run their business slowly into the ground US steel and K-mart style

creer
7 replies
22h48m

Not saying it's wrong but that seems a strange. Around here there are still small mills - some with strange strategies where they will drive lumber large distances. Although they do specialize in this or that product. And seem profitable even though they are small. Meaning that the market can perhaps be entered with a small mill.

But in many economic fields there are unstable states where all producers can be worried but happy not to expand and just raise prices - as long as nobody else expands. "Eventually" can be a long time.

throwup238
6 replies
22h33m

It's not about the size of the mill, but the capital cost to build a new one. No one is willing to invest the capital in building new mills because the old ones can always undercut their prices and kill them long before they turn a profit. It's the economic equivalent of a prisoner's dilemma.

creer
5 replies
22h28m

That works against a large new entrant. No industry is going to lower their massive collective profit just to shoo away a small new entrant.

jmalicki
2 replies
14h30m

Natural monopolies due to high capital costs are businesses like TSMC and ASML - you're not going to get a "small new entrant" with 4nm lithography for making high-end microchips.

creer
1 replies
12h27m

TSMC, ASML are as extreme as it gets. You might as well ignore them completely in this thread.

jmalicki
0 replies
3h58m

There are local versions - a veterinary emergency hospital with veterinary oncologists and cardiologists in a smaller city without other metros for hundreds of miles, for example.

throwup238
1 replies
22h7m

Lumbermills are a local industry since transportation is a very significant fraction of the final cost. No one is shipping wood from Oregon to a mill on the East coast to sell to a construction company in California, so every mill is very much sensitive to local competitors.

Ironically it's the larger mills that are insensitive to this dynamic, since they supply huge national customers like the big box stores or export to international markets. If Home Depot or Lowes decide their suppliers need a new mill, they finance it and it gets built.

creer
0 replies
21h53m

This is what suprised me when I did a (very cursory) look in there. It seems some mills do ship back and forth quite a ways along the West Coast.

And I don't know that Home Depot and Lowes have that much of the market. They are not the ones that serve large construction projects. But if they did, it would be enough of a long term market that they could influence prices by funding new mills in exchange for more say into the price, a share of any profit, both, whatever. If they had this capacity, they could solve this funding issue.

pixl97
0 replies
1d2h

This here. We see this cycle quite often. Some economic crisis in a product hits and the price shoots up. Other entrants raise capital for the rather expensive factories required to make the product in its modern form. By the time the factories come on line, the entrenched interests fat with profits plunge prices very low and for some time driving out the new players and then you see prices rise back to higher levels and maintain that price.

It seems to many people don't realize it's not about making and selling the product. It's about the economic/money game. It's not about selling a car, it's about being a bank giving financing. It's not about selling a retail product, it's about credit cards. It's not about refining mined products, it's about controlling the willingness to invest in the sector.

WalterBright
0 replies
21h46m

Investment capital for large projects is why the stock market was invented.

Der_Einzige
3 replies
1d2h

Everyone knows that a good reimplementation of CUDA will make them trillions but despite 15 years, no one has made anything even close to it.

There’s profit to be made and no entrants. How can we explain this? If your answer is “AMD et al tried” you aren’t paying attention to just how pathetic and shallow their efforts have been and still are.

cpgxiii
1 replies
1d1h

Every GPU vendor knows that actually supporting a reimplementation of CUDA for their hardware immediately signs them up for two problems:

1. Protracted lawsuits with the (now) second-most-valuable company in the world. 2. Any significant customers being loudly reminded by Nvidia that the EULA for CUDA tools prohibits their use on non-Nvidia hardware.

The problem is not the technical challenge of reimplementing the CUDA API or tools. The problem is the users want CUDA, not something that looks and behaves like CUDA but requires them to load a different set of libraries.

jmalicki
0 replies
14h28m

These days, you don't really need to support CUDA, just PyTorch gets you most of the way there.

You have Google TPUs, Amazon Inferon, a ton of smaller players that aren't quite getting traction - but there's a ton of investment there.

creer
0 replies
22h39m

In addition to the other response (risks), the economy is not a stable homogeneous field. None of the economy is a stable homogeneous field. Instead it's a bunch of discrete individuals living their life and each focusing on just a few things.

And this goes both ways. For a competitor to form requires one small team of founders who are insane enough (in a good way) to believe they should try it, and a funding source that's ready to take the gamble on/with them. So you might get a fantastically successful company "out of nowhere" (Amazon, say). Or you might get a field where nobody is at the moment on hand to try it. Or several do try it and fail silently and you never hear of them. They are individuals, not some mathematical process.

See also, even "efficient market" does not refer to THAT.

bequanna
0 replies
22h39m

In the long run, sure.

But as the saying goes: in the long run we’re all dead.

CPLX
0 replies
1d1h

Unless there is market power and exploitation by monopolists.

Which just so happens to be the overarching principal of Matt Stoller's life's work.

WalterBright
5 replies
21h48m

the article falls for the classic trap of "rising prices are not inflation, it's <something else I don't like>".

Inflation is a general price increase caused by an increase in the supply of money relative to the value of goods and services in the economy. It's simple supply & demand - more money chasing the same number of goods => general price increases. Inflation prices never going down is a clear indicator that this is the cause.

A general price increase could be cause by something like supply chain disruptions. But when the disruption eases, the prices will go back down. (We see this in the cost of a gallon of gas over time.)

neilwilson
2 replies
21h16m

It’s not quite that simple.

If I give you a new £20 note and you put it in a drawer then that won’t cause prices to go up.

It’s not money supply that’s the issue, it’s money flow vs capacity to produce.

There isn’t a fixed amount of stuff and there certainly isn’t a fixed speed at which money can change hands.

WalterBright
1 replies
18h23m

If I give you a new £20 note and you put it in a drawer then that won’t cause prices to go up.

Withdrawing money from circulation (or lighting your cigars with it) cause a reduction in the money supply, meaning each remaining dollar is worth more, which is deflation.

neilwilson
0 replies
5h58m

People withdraw money from circulation all the time. It's called 'saving'. That's what a 'deficit' is - people saving rather than spending. That's what money in a bank account is. It's what a government bond holding is.

That isn't reducing the money supply - burnt notes remain on the books of the note issuer and are included in the calculation. It reduces the overall velocity of money, not the amount of money.

That's because the velocity is variable. Not just in aggregate but in individual areas.

Dollars change hands at variable speed. That's why turnover is measured in dollars per month, not dollars.

Mixing up dollars per month and dollars is like mixing up miles per hour and miles.

throwawayqqq11
1 replies
18h49m

Inflation should effect wages proportionally to prices. If it does not, its just a price imcrease, which is whats happening. Something, termites, something ...

WalterBright
0 replies
18h22m

Inflation does indeed cause wages to rise proportionately. But it takes time. Just like dropping a bucket of water in a bathtub does not immediately cause the entire surface to reach a new level.

kiney
1 replies
1d3h

There's a very simple reason why it does very little to substantiate its core claim: The claim is simply wrong and therefore can't be substantiated

johnnyanmac
0 replies
21h28m

so, you do not believe prices are inflating?

chomskyole
1 replies
12h56m

Profits across many companies in construction have significantly increased post covid. Not only for construction companies, but also various supplier (e.g. building technology, construction products).

hef19898
0 replies
7h7m

At best, that would be some sort cartel, multiple really. Which is quite different from a monopoly, which again is something from dominant market power...

sanderjd
0 replies
6h13m

I think the article is just "here are a few things I'm aware of that are more expensive than I think they should be". There isn't any analysis of the industries they are in or the dynamics that enable them to maintain those price points.

The Verisign case is the strongest one, but even granting that, those price increases over the years look very aligned with the aggregate rate of inflation to me. (I do personally think that things like Verisign would be good candidates for public administration, but there are potential drawbacks to that as well.)

One issue is that there are people who do these kinds of deep analyses of industries and how various players in them can maintain particular price points and margins, but none of those people are fundamentally skeptical of the whole system, they are mostly Wall Street analysts or adjacent kinds of people, who don't question capitalism for a moment (it is their "water"). So on the one side we have skeptics mostly without deep expertise and on the other side we have deep expertise mostly without skepticism. It's not surprising that we don't get a huge amount of well-researched criticism of the system.

notahacker
0 replies
1d4h

yeah it's basically a longwinded way of saying "market power is a thing", and a clumsy one that kludges absolute monopoly rentiers like Verisign, companies reneging on partnerships and conventional market leaders tend to put their prices up when their product is much more useful than the alternatives all into the same bracket.

Market power obviously is a thing which affects pricing, but market power in BIM software doesn't have anywhere near as much to do with construction costs or everyday experience as fuel price increases or labour shortages.

m463
0 replies
13h53m

Assa Abloy

You can buy Schlage, Kwikset, ABUS...

"Kwikset is an American lock and lockset manufacturer owned by Assa Abloy"

I think another example could be Luxottica (glasses).

igornadj
0 replies
10h31m

Each cut isn't much, and there's no point stressing about it, but accumulate enough of them and it's a problem.

Doesn't the fact that everything is increasing in price also affect these labourers? Who see the prices in their grocery stores, cars, housing costs increasing, and then have to demand higher wages to stay afloat themselves?

Can any one cause be tied to the whole effect? No. Would [much] more aggressive anti-greed/anti-monopoly/anti-corruption handling of the economy stabilise inflation? Without doubt.

ghaff
0 replies
1d4h

In fact, no serious study of the construction industry pins cost increases on stuff like that. There are far more powerful factors at play. The laborers you hire want to be paid more than before (and the government is rising minimum wages). Compliance is getting costlier due to ever-evolving building codes, environmental and energy regulations, and zoning. Customer expectations are increasing (higher finish, more sqft). To the extent the materials are getting expensive, it's usually not your lumber mill being greedy.

In general, you're probably seeing some increased disparity between the cost of things that require some significant levels of labor--especially if skills are involved to any great degree--and those that can be dealt with mostly by "just" throwing capital at the problem.

Over time I expect you'll see more automation, more self-service, and--yes--more just doing without of things that cost more to deliver than you can or want to pay for.

alephnerd
0 replies
1d4h

is that it does very little to substantiate its core claim - that the reason the economy is broken are small monopolists-but-not-really-monopolists who are trying to fleece you

It's Matt Stoller [0].

He tends to write his substack (and formerly his blog at the OMI under New America) in a very pathos driven manner in order to change the conversation around anti-trust.

He also seems to be trying to become a Republican Rohit Chopra (assuming Hawley climbs the ladder) and is competing with Oren Cass on that front.

There is a need to rework antitrust to take into account digital platforms, but imo Matt Stoller's attempts only serve to undermine the conversation, given that these are very technical conversations that have a high legal bar to pass. Going all "bull in a China store" a la Lina Khan only leads to appeals and out of court settlements in favor of the defendants.

Based on second-hand experience, now's the best time for M&A on that front - you're almost guaranteed to have the FTC fumble a case and settle out of court.

[0] - https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/04/21/matt-stoll...

teeray
16 replies
1d4h

My most recent instance of this is online ordering with Dunkin’ Donuts. The app has no feedback to indicate what items are in stock, so it’s possible to order things that can’t be fulfilled. If you don’t want their substitute, the store cannot cancel the order. You have to call an 800 number and plead your case. Sure, it’s not a huge hardship, but it’s another instance of making the cancellation path more difficult to frustrate people into writing off the order.

GiorgioG
10 replies
1d3h

Dispute the charge with your bank - you did not get what you paid for, and it's not on you to chase them down and waste your time. If/when enough people do this, they'll get their shit together.

citizenpaul
7 replies
1d3h

This is basically a variation on tragedy of the commons. The solution is right there in front of everyone and "simply" requires everyone to do it coordinately. I've told this solution to numerous people, just log onto your bank website and click "dispute" and thats it you are done. Nope, they either don't believe me or are afraid of doing it because "banks". They continue to just allow crappy businesses to effectively steal their money or they waste time with a 45min customer service call.

Its the same with many other things like simply boycotting an abusive business. People say starbucks is bad. All that is required to "destroy" starbucks is simply go to any of the dozens of local coffee shops that exist everywhere for a month instead. That would make the heads spin/roll at the C-level at starbucks but still no one does it.

CPLX
3 replies
1d1h

Disputing with banks isn't particularly reliable. These larger companies have a script now for responding for one, and the other thing that happens is they'll kill your account and permanently ban you.

Neither of those accomplishes the goal of being able to purchase the product or service without being ripped off.

citizenpaul
1 replies
2h53m

Neither of those accomplishes the goal of being able to purchase the product or service without being ripped off.

I'd argue that its impossible to totally do that since humanity has never figured out how to remove scammers from the population. It is the way to fight back against it so I think that is really splitting hairs on complex sociology-econmic explanations.

Do you really want to continue do business with a company ripping you off?

CPLX
0 replies
1h5m

Do you really want to continue do business with a company ripping you off?

Fucking no. Which is why it sucks when that's not a choice we have.

teeray
0 replies
1d

the other thing that happens is they'll kill your account and permanently ban you

This practice really should be illegal. “I don’t want to do business with you because I screwed up, you correctly called me on it, and I had to refund you.” PERMABAN.

lupire
1 replies
1d2h

Why do you believe that people who think Starbucks is bad are the people who love Starbucks? The vast majority of people aren't coffee snobs.

citizenpaul
0 replies
20h9m

Oh man... it was just a random example of a business people regularly slam publicly for bad behavior with tons of alternatives. Feel free to fill in a bad company of your choice but often people simply keep going back to the company that ripped them off even when its trivial to change was my point.

gruez
0 replies
1d2h

I've told this solution to numerous people, just log onto your bank website and click "dispute" and thats it you are done

This depends heavily on your bank. I can see this working if you're using a neobank, but there's plenty of legacy banks that require you to call in, wait on hold, etc.

Der_Einzige
1 replies
1d2h

You know that companies will eventually wise up and start taking you to small claims court for trying to do this small time subversiveness. AI will make stuff like this possible, and individualized resistance like this can and will be snuffed out once and for all.

portaouflop
0 replies
1d1h

Why should you continue to be a customer with these companies in that case?

Sounds like learned helplessness to me

alephnerd
4 replies
1d4h

Dunkin's are franchises.

What you're describing is an inventory cataloging issue caused by limited quality and inventory control from corporate over franchisees.

GiorgioG
1 replies
1d3h

Dunkin's are a franchise, but they're using Dunkin's hardware, software, etc. It's absolutely within their ability to track (and force franchisees to track) inventory. It's also within Dunkin Corp's ability to give stores the capability to provide refunds from the retail locations.

alephnerd
0 replies
1d3h

It's absolutely within their ability to track (and force franchisees to track) inventory

Depends on whether or not the franchisee has implemented inventory tracking correctly.

It's also within Dunkin Corp's ability to give stores the capability to provide refunds from the retail locations

That's the franchisee's decision at that point. Dunkin's corporate was out of the loop in that transaction and as such is reticent.

Dunkin's tends to hold its franchisees to a lower quality bar imo.

zo1
0 replies
22h50m

Screw franchises and franchising. That's the kind of business model we need to get rid of, because it's basically a "subsidiary" model that shields the parent company from liability.

At the very least it complicates the dynamic. "Am I really hurting Dunkins or am I just ruining a small business owner that pays a crap ton of money to the franchise owner and mortgaged his house to open this little franchise of Dunkins".

teeray
0 replies
1d3h

The comment was about stores not being empowered to cancel orders to the detriment of the customers, not about the reasons why that order was cancelled. The point stands if, say, the store was suddenly closed due to a burst pipe. Corporate is counting on there being enough friction in calling them on the phone to prevent people from doing it altogether.

baggy_trough
15 replies
1d5h

The provided examples don't hold a candle to the termite-gnawing power of the armies of government bureaucrats and lawyers that are the real source of the cost explosion.

passwordoops
13 replies
1d5h

I hear this a lot whenever antitrust is brought up. Do you have concrete examples of how, say, the DMV or Kansas Board of Consumer Welfare costs society more that, say, UnitedHealth's price gouging, Microsoft's SaaS, or Google and Apple's backdoor deals with Apple or Amazon's practices?

VincentEvans
7 replies
1d5h

Haha, DMV… I just moved to North Carolina, and the next available appointment at the DMV to change the address on my driver license is in September (it’s beginning of June as I am writing this).

When I moved the last time in a different state - the appointment to change my address on my driver license was same week and took about 15 mins, most of which I spent trying to get a decent picture.

So I “know” it doesn’t take very long to print a plastic card.

Closi
3 replies
1d5h

Doesnt that likely demonstrate insufficient resource/capacity rather than OPs point that there are too many bureaucrats?

michaelt
1 replies
1d4h

In my country, you wouldn’t need an in person ‘appointment’ to merely change an address on a driving license.

Seems rather inefficient to have offices all over the state, appointments, inefficiencies like missed appointments, and the waste of citizens’ time, for a process that can be done by mail.

yuliyp
0 replies
1d4h

Moving states requires validating the information from the previous state too. It's not a matter of the new state just updating an entry in its database. It's an entirely new entry. Given that, in person validation makes sense.

Moving within a state is simpler, and indeed can be done online in most states.

Granted in many countries there's a national ID system. Also a part of the point of government-issued IDs is that there's more validation around its issuance, and many other parts of society take advantage of that.

teitoklien
0 replies
1d4h

Maybe there are too many bureaucrats that all the expenses are bloated and funding payroll of unproductive gov workers.

Personally ive found that to be more true in most countries.

Civil service/Gov workers get tons of new unnecessary roles with bloated titles for departments that barely do anything, just to maintain a cycle of promotion, to keep the gov workforce “motivated”.

Not that i disagree that United Health is price gouging that there are way too many corrupt unnatural monopolistic companies preventing america from growing fast and allowing innovation to take place.

I think both things are true at the same time.

Talk to any gov department and they’ll often tell you, the budgeting is structured in a horrible way that it encourages them to do wasteful spending, they must keep spending entirety of their “budget” to retain a similar sized budget next year, “use it or lose it”, to avoid going through hassle of convincing politicians to re-boost budget later, departments resort to wasting money with meaningless expenses just to retain their budgets…

Extrapolate that to a gov that spends more than a trillion dollars annually at times and this is a disastrous level of wasteful spending.

passwordoops
0 replies
1d5h

Ever try to reach Google customer support?

nonameiguess
0 replies
1d4h

This isn't really the DMV's doing on its own. Same thing happened when I moved to Texas (or at least when I first needed to get a driver's license). In both cases, the root cause is GOP control of a purplish state trending blue shutting down offices and restricting ID services on purpose to suppress voting turnout.

jrmg
0 replies
1d4h

You can just go to the NC DMV in the afternoon. Afternoons are not appointment based. I updated my license two days after moving here. I had to wait an hour or so.

sneak
2 replies
1d4h

How about the wars the US is fighting directly in 13 different sovereign countries presently? That’s gotta be slightly costly.

tekla
1 replies
1d4h

Damn I must have missed this news. What countries is the US at war with?

sneak
0 replies
1d4h

None of it is declared war; it’s all just “special military operation” kinda stuff. It’s actually crazy how many different places the US has boots on the ground.

More details in the ET podcast episode, in public rn and can’t find/transcribe. https://open.spotify.com/episode/2Fcid5hjKbdgLWmvHreOpV

willcipriano
0 replies
1d5h

War is probably the largest line item for most people. Losing decades long wars is expensive. You have the social decay that comes with focusing abroad rather than at home. Homelessness, drug addiction (my friends probably were killed by heroin made from poppies that a marine was tasked with protecting, maybe some of yours too)

Running a close second (maybe first) is regulatory capture, things like patents and certificates of need. Requirements for patented safety features in cars, patents on medicine, copyright on characters your grandma grew up with.

luckylion
0 replies
1d4h

Some DMV would be a part of the government, it wouldn't be _the_ government. To not build up a straw man, you'd have to compare it to, say, Apple's battery quality control department or Amazon's warehouse maintenance team.

passwordoops
0 replies
1d5h

Also, I forgot to ask specifically which army of government bureaucrats and lawyers? The ones who try to go after the private entities who profit from harming health and environment but outsource costs too greater society?

throwaway63467
13 replies
1d4h

I think in many areas the name of the game is to move the entire market to a place where no real competition is possible. Housing in most parts of the world is a good example, there’s no reason prices for housing should’ve gone up 300-400 % above inflation as we really haven’t run out of space in most places, yet here we are. I have a hard time believing this is just the outcome of unfortunate market conditions, it seems quite engineered to me.

patrickmay
11 replies
1d4h

Housing costs are primarily due to zoning and other local and state government policies that limit or prohibit construction.

detourdog
4 replies
1d2h

Those aren’t invalid things to drive a markets costs. I would say modern building codes that are used to ensure safety standards and accessibility are true drivers of cost. Achieving new standards without a cost increase is unrealistic. Older higher quality doors need to be replaced with inferior quality doors that have UL stickers.

PartiallyTyped
3 replies
1d2h

I don't believe these changes can drive such an absurd increase in housing costs.

megaman821
1 replies
1d1h

Structures do cost more. This is mostly increases in labor and code compliance costs. In hot markets the structure cost is dwarfed by the land cost though. There is only so much prime real estate available. That won't stop techies from trying to build a house in a factory to bring down prices, even though that makes little sense.

PartiallyTyped
0 replies
23h57m

Here, in Ireland, the cost is pushed up mostly by planning. There's plenty of space, but due to planning (mostly limited by NIMBYs and apparently professional objectors), it is difficult to actually get approval for anything.

There's plenty of space and myriad of old houses in a state of decomposition, but only houses can be built, and apartments are scarce. People are going into bidding wars where you need to throw an extra 20% just to win the bid.

It certainly isn't the cost of materials or labor costs.

detourdog
0 replies
22h27m

They did for my project. Code compliance number driver of cost by a longshot in change of use renovation project. The sprinkler system and the 4’ vertical lift cost as much as the 12,000 sq foot building on 1 acre.

throwaway63467
2 replies
1d3h

And these policies come into place all by themselves?

patrickmay
1 replies
1d3h

Of course not, but the policies are driven by politics that prevent the market from providing what people want. High housing prices aren't a market failure, they are due to NIMBYism.

pixl97
0 replies
1d2h

This is a yes and no thing and can wildly vary.

In states that have much lower rates of regulation, house prices are still up off the charts, yea, still way lower than California, but they have pushed prices out of reach of the people that live there, so there has to be multiple pieces occurring (for example low interest rates for a very long time).

pydry
2 replies
1d3h

Housing went up globally because of local policies all across the world all at the same time, huh?

Perhaps housing went up because of a global increase in wealth inequality.

gruez
1 replies
1d2h

Housing went up globally because of local policies all across the world all at the same time, huh?

1. source for "Housing went up globally"?

2. You don't really need every jurisdiction to by NIMBY for global house prices to go up. For instance if half the world is NIMBY and the other half is "meh", and housing prices in the NIMBY half went up 50% while the other half stayed the same, you'd still observe that "Housing went up globally".

detourdog
0 replies
1d2h

In Massachusetts we have to follow international building codes with some commonwealth wide modifications.

bobajeff
0 replies
1d4h

Speaking of housing it looks to me like housing costs are having the biggest effect on the economy as it typically costs more than a third of income for most people. It's probably the biggest cost of living expense and so the reason people are asking for higher wages and why running small businesses is becoming harder or impossible. I'm sure the dominos don't stop there either.

torpfactory
7 replies
1d4h

I have a theory that one of the core problems is that American businesses just expect to make too much money. Everyone seems to be aiming for 30% gross margin or more, and then working to get monopoly power or regulatory capture in order to achieve that.

When I work with businesses in China they sort of expect cutthroat competition and I'm sure they're not seeing 30% margins. Low a behold stuff is a lot cheaper there, beyond what you'd expect given the labor price difference.

PartiallyTyped
3 replies
1d2h

I have a theory that one of the core problems is that American businesses just expect to make too much money.

If you pay attention to certain board meetings, earnings calls, and so on, or if you had the opportunity to work for certain companies, you'll find people talking about the growth of growth, i.e. second order. It seems that the notion of sustainable growth is just gone. Corporations chasing lofty goals in absurdly short timeframes.

galdosdi
1 replies
19h12m

This excess greed in the shareholding class is really disturbing, because historically very similar behavior has preceded decadence, decline, and fall.

The roman empire's last decades and centuries were marked by huge growth in the latifundium (large plantations owned by a few rich politically connected men) which were powered by cheap slave labor in contrast to the earlier freeholding small farmers who famously formed the backbone of the Roman state by earning their farms in exchange for their ten years or military service, thus achieving the Roman Dream.

Ironically the latifundium, in their quest to maximize growth and profits for the few at all costs, were actually far less productive than the freeholders.

It is disturbing how close an analogy this forms to modern Wall St culture focused on "growth at all costs" and only thinking one quarter ahead at a time

yoyohello13
0 replies
1h24m

The more things change the more they stay the same. Despite all our progress we are still the same humans we were 1000 years ago. There will always be people getting rich off of others labor. Eventually the working class gets mad enough to re-balance power for a time until the cycle starts again. For some reason we just accept this as inevitable.

kjkjadksj
0 replies
20h46m

Its modern investing. People are selling options covered by their shares. Little movements from headlines can turn into big double digit percent gains on a position in a day due to the way options are priced.

alephnerd
1 replies
1d4h

Antitrust is different in China.

State-Owned Enterprises and locally backed private conglomerates tend to help put downward price pressures on a lot of goods [0][1] plus there is a system of price ceilings depending on the commodity or product.

Local subsidies and tax breaks also help with minimizing the upfront cost allowing for smaller margins being sustainable over a longer term.

[0] - https://businesslawreview.uchicago.edu/print-archive/chinese...

[1] - https://global.oup.com/academic/product/chinese-antitrust-ex...

chii
0 replies
1d2h

For a lot of commodity manufacturing stuffs (think screws, etc), it's actually true that china has a lot of internal competition which drives down costs.

EasyMark
0 replies
17h1m

This is one reason 2/3 of my investments are in steady growth (I hope) realty. I don’t trust the markets more than 1/3 of my investments.

photochemsyn
6 replies
1d4h

The fundamental problem all these examples are linked to is the rise of centralized power in the economy, and the antidote has been known for a long time, see this 1952 book by John Galbraith:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Capitalism

"...private decisions could and presumably would lead to the unhampered exploitation of the public, or of workers, farmers and others who are intrinsically weak as individuals. Such decisions would be a proper object of state interference or would soon so become."

Economists like Michael Hudson (I'm a fan) repeatedly refer to the rentier class in this context, and a rentier system (wiki) can be described as one in which

"productive investments are largely lacking, the highest possible share of income is skimmed off from ground-rents, leases and rents and thus in many developing countries, rentier capitalism is an obstacle to economic development. A rentier is someone who earns income from capital without working. (wiki)"

Note that if you take capital and use it in a different way, e.g. to build a factory in which you are actively involved in design and production, you are not a rentier, but rather an industrial capitalist (I think we can safely put Elon Musk in this category, and Warren Buffett in the rentier group, for example). For more on this notion:

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/dilemmas-of-the-rentier-class

There are several policies which undermine the power of the rentier class - antitrust in competetive industries is one, but equally important is the nationalization and state control of fundamental sectors that are non-competitive and thus fall under the natural monopoly heading - water, roads, ports, electrical grids, fiber optic networks, basic public health care and education, emergency services, etc. - basically the infrastructure that makes all other economic activity possible, and which the likes of Buffett - a noted utility investor - have had their fat fingers in for many decades.

China has incorporated these concepts into its state capitalism model and that's why it is outperforming the USA and Europe when it comes to technological and economic development in almost all sectors, from solar panels to high speed rail to water projects, and now, chips. They're still behind in space tech, but that's really only due to the phenomenon of SpaceX.

fallingknife
5 replies
1d4h

The utility sector has a 10% profit margin. Hardly an example of a monopoly abusing its position. If utilities were nationalized the maximum possible gain is 10% and the potential loss is the unlimited capacity of the government to waste resources.

nothercastle
3 replies
1d3h

Not true the maximum losses a private utility can generate for the public are unlimited because the losses always get nationalized. The 10% margin is after C suite grift so it’s likely more than 10% you can save. Plus if you are on the hook for losses might as well take the 10%

fallingknife
2 replies
1d

It will be paid out of tax money either way. To save me money the government would have to either:

1. run the operation at least 90% as cost effectively

2. be less likely to make major costly mistakes

From my experience with government the probability of 1 is 0% and the probability of 2 is minimal. At least when PG&E caused those wildfires, their execs were fired and had to pay $100 million of their own personal money in damages. This doesn't happen when government employees screw up. They don't even lose their jobs.

nothercastle
1 replies
21h12m

The fact that they had 100 mil to pay speaks of the excesses salaries were paying them.

PGE isn’t really run any more efficiently than a government institution, at least with government there is some measure of transparency, though accountability is lacking for both situations.

Capitalism doesn’t drive efficiency when there is no competition, in fact the incentive for PGE is to drive up actual costs and then raise prices to maintain 10%. The more expensive and inefficient they are the larger the 10% bucket is.

fallingknife
0 replies
19h23m

That 100 mil is 0.4% of annual revenue, and that isn't one year's pay, it's a lifetime of accumulation. There were 20 people in the settlement averaging close to 6 mil each (it was actually 117 mil total). That's really not that high of a net worth for people running an enormous power company. Pay peanuts, get monkeys.

As for transparency, audited financial statements of public companies are infinitely more information than you will ever get about the finances of a government bureaucracy. And their only incentive is to use up their budget so they can ask for an increase next year.

creer
0 replies
22h14m

10% profit margin says not much.

Maximum 10% gain is not true for example because a contracted utility has little pressure to improve services, create new services, invent new energy processes, open or serve new markets. They can go with the generic political will and collect their garanteed 10%. Private enterprise wins or loses potentially big specifically by not doing that.

Maximum 10% gain is also not true for example because there is little pressure to "do it right" from an economic outcome point of view (when to plan expansions, how to schedule maintenance). Skipping the extremely politically incorrect example.

Maximum 10% gain is also not true for example because the current sector rarely has the opportunity to expand dramatically to support a dramatic new industry. (In that case, the gain would come from the new industry - AND the expanding utility sector) Even the Pacific North West did it the other way around: available surplus energy caused new industry to settle there.

johnwatson11218
5 replies
1d3h

This is the time for AI assisted efforts to merge with open source to deliver alternatives to all these Big Company type proprietary software solutions. I have been thinking of what it would cost to create enterprise workflow and document management but based on nodejs. Perhaps targeting the business markets of a smaller country such as Pakistan could be a way to get real world feedback before larger markets are targeted. Need all the documentation translated into Pashto? There is now an app for that. Seriously - how hard would it be to recreate the 80% of features that Autodesk is actually used for? Just to get something that is "good enough", using AI to architect it, design the test suites, the integration suites etc?

losthalo
3 replies
1d2h

The problem is the cost to shift to a new product, not cost of the product.

johnwatson11218
2 replies
1d2h

Not sure what you guys are trying to say here but I have seen, with my own eyes, large enterprise software systems that end up being so fragile it makes you laugh. The incumbents in this space make dinosaurs look like spring chickens by comparison.

There are millions upon millions of dollars being spent on stupid, outdated software that simply does not work. The main thrust of my original comment was that - "you thought open source was impressive? wait until the rise of AI powered open source". I think the highly arcane world of enterprise software is similar to being a travel agent in the mid to late 90s.

losthalo
1 replies
9h3m

Do you think AI is going to solve the problems of proprietary data formats and retraining entire workforces to whole new workflows?

AI isn't, so far as I can tell, a universal Easy Button®.

Open Source didn't scratch the surface of those problems, but AI will solve them somehow?

johnwatson11218
0 replies
7h9m

I think that if you have the skills to manage a software project of any complexity then you, alone can create what teams are doing today. I think AI can characterize proprietary data formats and assist by writing parsers, providing helpful error messages, and pointing out inconsistencies and gaps in the specification. AI can eliminate the need for so much workforce. Rather than training existing workers, it can become the existing workers. ChatGPT is already more competent than 1/2 of the workers at my last job. Case in point - two teams were independently assigned a particular upgrade task. Since the project managers used different terms they didn't realize they were doing double work. Large language models could already disambiguate that kind of thing way back then, it is only getting better.

pixl97
0 replies
1d2h

And who is providing support when the file they create doesn't work?

At the end of the day test and integration is a stupid huge amount of work. Moreso when you have one large company that controls the format and makes "little oopsies" that you have to figure out and fix.

anonu
4 replies
1d3h

Whatever happened to "your margin is my opportunity"?

pseudalopex
0 replies
1d2h

"Competition is for losers"

pixl97
0 replies
1d2h

Massive amounts of capital required to join the market. Especially where you can't directly sale to the customer (and yes, this includes selling on Amazon).

lamontcg
0 replies
13h57m

Regulatory capture (in addition to all the other answers you got)

CPLX
0 replies
1d1h

Anti-competitive pricing.

This shouldn't really be confusing this is first hour first day stuff if you study how and why monopolies exist and can persist.

Here's an instant example. Let's say I own every single gas station in your city, a thousand of them or so, and I charge 100% gross margins on gasoline. I do hundreds of millions of dollars in business.

You want to open a gas station with lower margins and undercut me. You pick a good location and open it.

Great, my location across the street can just sell below your cost unit you run out of money. Bye, see you later. Was that in your business plan? Where'd you get all that capital? What kind of return were they expecting, and how will you deliver it selling below cost for an indefinitely long period of time?

Also where are you sourcing your gas? Maybe I have already locked up all the current deliveries given my buying power with the refinery. Also what happens when you find out that nobody will service your pumps because I've locked them all up too, and am paying more than you can afford. And you can't afford anything because you're selling every gallon at a loss. Meanwhile the last couple years of 100% margins have given me a giant pile of cash I can use to do all of these things.

That's just a basic example. Sure yeah maybe you could somehow attack this market, with a bunch of capital, maybe there's like something you could do to compete with me.

But you're an ambitious and aggressive entrepreneur and that is going to be a TON of work. Why not just, like, start a different business?

DarkContinent
4 replies
1d4h

Re LinkedIn as an example of an economic termite:

It's certainly true that LinkedIn is the go to for white collar professionals seeking to make their resumes visible passively to recruiters. But isn't life still easier with LinkedIn than in the before times, when recruiters would dig deep to get folks' phone numbers and then have to call each of those people individually? (I think the modern equivalent would be email addresses.)

It's true that LinkedIn makes recruiting much easier to scale to a mass market. And it's also true that it has a monopoly on that scaling for professional employees. But is it fair to call them an economic termite when it's still possible to do sourcing in an admittedly clunky and old fashioned way? Just because they have a monopoly on scaled recruiting doesn't mean that they hold all the cards the way Linde (also in the profile) would in the gas market. This is particularly borne out by the existence of Indeed or Stack Overflow as options for posting your resume for recruiting.

hobs
1 replies
1d4h

2022 Stack discontinued their job posting options as it was not viable.

marcosdumay
0 replies
20h45m

I wouldn't use Stack Overflow as an example of the market not being viable. 2022 SO had a horrible reputation problem, and their main value proposition (that is, qualifying the candidates) used a metric that was completely broken and probably counterproductive in practice (but we can't know that one for sure).

nutrie
0 replies
1d4h

Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. It's not the point. Lawyers tend to puff their smokescreens, convincing people antitrust agenda is difficult. It isn't. Once you start eating a certain amount of the pie, the rules of the game change for you, and you only, because you become too strong, causing imbalance and threatening stability.

I'm sure LinkedIn's legal department employs an army of antitrust specialists frequently dealing with accusations from their competitors. That's a good thing.

There's one position you never wanna be in: When you don't have a choice, and it doesn't matter whether you're a company or an individual. Autodesk is one prime example of a long-term nasty sales behavior significantly distorting the market. Last but not least, democratic governments around the globe have been failing to enforce these laws, not to mention these are in many cases too permissive in the first place.

PartiallyTyped
0 replies
1d2h

LinkedIn is eating both sides of the pie; 50 eur for premium, it's ridiculous and we are here because we really have no choice.

flightster
3 replies
1d5h

You forgot vets and dentists!

dventimi
0 replies
22h19m

And attorneys!

bearjaws
0 replies
1d5h

Let's not even start on healthcare and PE...

Der_Einzige
0 replies
1d2h

And Chiropractors!

Joel_Mckay
3 replies
1d3h

removed due to obligatory disclosure liability

CPLX
2 replies
1d1h

Despite the botfly score of an 83% LLM poorly auto-generated article

Can you explain what this comment means?

This article is the personal writing of Matt Stoller, the most prominent writer on issues of monopoly and anti-trust.

What do you think it is?

Joel_Mckay
1 replies
1d1h

removed due to obligatory disclosure liability

CPLX
0 replies
1d1h

And there’s some reason I should believe the assessment of some random LLM algorithm is more reliable than my own in trusting that I am reading a guy who I’ve met and talked to a couple times, who writes in a specific style and responds to people on Twitter every day, speaks in public regularly, and has been a prominent blogger with a consistent level of output for about 20 years?

talkingtab
2 replies
1d4h

I have an axe to grind, so let me be clear: I believe there is strong evidence that we have moved from something approaching a democracy to a corpocracy. I expect many people will tune this out, but here is the question, crucial one.

Who Benefits?

Do the laws that are passed benefit the common people or corporations? You figure it out. Please do not bother with the whole trickle down nonsense, unless you want to buy this bridge I have. And who can use the law? Can you afford a lawyer? Who can? The author says ".. I want my money back!" Good luck with that. If common people cannot enact laws to their benefit and cannot use the courts to their right wrongs, then we are not a democracy.

The article states: "the last four administrations choosing to ‘privatize’ domain registration". So why did that happen? It happened because we allow corporations to pay for our elections. You want to be elected or get funding to stay there? Lobby, aka bribe.

This is legal because the US Supreme Court in *Citizens United v. FEC* granted personhood to corporations. We have a situation where our "elected" officials owe there election to corporations.

In case you think this analysis is far-fetched here is an article on the American Bar Association site: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_r...

The crucial issue, the emergency, is that these "termites" as the article calls them are now so pervasive that they threaten our society. Our government has decided to use the change in prices, inflation, as the crucial measure of well being. Their argument is that if the rate of change is low, there is no problem. However, wages are the major factor in the economic condition of common people. If common people cannot earn enough (low wages) enough to afford common costs of living we have a new term to add to 'enshitification', etc. It is 'enslavification'.

palata
0 replies
1d3h

I think that we see everywhere that we are reaching the end of a system. Everything has been pushed to its limits.

gruez
0 replies
1d2h

This is legal because the US Supreme Court in Citizens United v. FEC granted personhood to corporations.

This is a misunderstanding of Citizens United v. FEC. From wikipedia

The court held 5–4 that the freedom of speech clause of the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations, nonprofit organizations, labor unions, and other associations.

It didn't grant "personhood to corporations". That was already a recognized concept centuries before.

nv-vn
2 replies
1d4h

Today, Verisign is the single most profitable company in the stock market, a great example of an economic termite

This is just blatantly false. VeriSign is in fact the 1215th most profitable company in the stock market [1]. By operating margin, it's 155th [2]. I find it hard to give an article much credit when I can't even get past the introduction without having to comb through citationless false/misleading statements.

[1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/most-profitable-companies/pag...

[2] https://companiesmarketcap.com/top-companies-by-operating-ma...

snozolli
1 replies
1d

Verisign has a profit of around $1B with around 1k employees.

Ingersoll Rand has around 18k employees. SBI holdings has around 19k. Beiersdorf has around 21k.

I don't know what the author was thinking or why it was phrased that way, but Verisign seems vastly more profitable per employee than others on the list. Also, I have no idea why they even need ~1k employees.

nv-vn
0 replies
17h13m

Tbf, this is page 13 of the list. If you go to the first page, Saudi Aramco made $230B with 73k employees according to their website. This is still ~3x as much profits/employee as VeriSign. FAANGs are pretty comparable as well. It's definitely a very profitable company _per employee_, but I fail to find a metric where Verisign can be described as the most profitable public company

dindobre
2 replies
1d3h

I feel like the gist of this could have been "rent seekers bad", something I'd strongly agree with. A non-trivial part of society is checked out of real work and milking others dry because of existing conditions or acquired leverage.

tinnet
0 replies
1d2h

I agree. It seems like an effort to criticize issues of late stage capitalism without sounding like a socialist.

There’s also strong overlaps with Varoufakis’ “Technofeudalism”, I.e. construction companies living in autodesks fiefdom.

losthalo
0 replies
1d2h

Has anyone done a real study on what value the financial industly adds?

berniedurfee
2 replies
22h27m

They forgot Adobe. Oh, and Protools. And I’m sure many others.

adzm
1 replies
22h4m

Protools has plenty of competition in my experience.

berniedurfee
0 replies
21h24m

Not in pro-studios. Most are stuck in Protools forever due to lack of interoperability with other software.

You can run anything you want, until you need to send a session to another studio and they only use Protools.

theptip
1 replies
1d3h

I do wonder if a better antitrust strategy would be to pursue a portfolio of actions against second- or third-tier companies like this; the current strategy of going up against Meta, Google, Apple is sound in terms of raw size of antitrust abuses going on, but they remain some of the most popular brands in the US and so it’s often hard to show consumer harm.

As a counterpoint, I suspect building momentum by actually winning a bunch of smaller cases for companies like Autodesk or Verisign where the average consumer doesn’t have an opinion, could shift the Overton Window on the issue.

I know you come into leadership positions at agencies like the FTC planning for only having 4 years, maybe the above is naive politically. Still, one can hope.

CPLX
0 replies
1d1h

The FTC is doing that too all the time now. For obvious reasons they don't draw the same headlines.

smsm42
1 replies
1d2h

I am wondering about the Autodesk example. If they suck so much and the users hate them so much, why no competition have arisen? Are there some government induced barriers? We saw Microsoft has been an unassailable incumbent on browser market, OS market, personal computing market, etc. And yet, their perceived monopoly has been successfully attacked. It took big companies like Google and Apple and IBM, but it turned out not to be impossible. I'm sure some big companies wouldn't mind a chunk of CAD market - why it's not happening then?

TheJoeMan
0 replies
19h29m

For starters the silicon valley types keep pitching cloud-only webbrowser-based tech stacks. Ex. for mechanical design OnShape et. al. Actually Solidworks is trying to push to web-based which few want…

pudwallabee
1 replies
1d

The termites thing is kind of amusing. But isnt much of whats described in the article properly known as “rent seeking”?

A monopoly might be the ultimate form of rent seeking. But for example a company that buys other companies/products in bulk to trap customers, but never improves or maintains those products and increases prices, is not only engaged in rent seeking but probably committing fraud. But expectation fraud is not a crime.

I think theres a tipping point in economics that once rent seeking becomes a certain percentage of the economy, its pretty much over.

Its economic corruption partnered with govt corruption.

lamontcg
0 replies
13h57m

Yeah, it is just rent seeking behavior, often with regulatory capture.

We don't need to invent new terms for it.

And the sloppy presentation here with the 'clever' analogy clearly didn't do the topic well based on the upvoted comments.

barlines
1 replies
1d4h

Economic Termite is a useful new term and I do hope it becomes more popular.

Some other examples that the author didn't cover:

Payment processors: VISA/ Mastercard have near monopoly over transaction fees

Digital Ads: Google & Facebook are the Economic Termites in that space.

Cloud Service Providers: The ET's here are AWS and Azure!

Text book publishers: Prices always ever go up as the publishers control the market tightly.

immibis
0 replies
1d3h

Americans will swear that Visa and Mastercard earn their transaction fees, but the EU simply mandated them much lower and they were suddenly much lower, and the cards still work here. You don't get rewards, but that's fine, because you're saving that money in fees.

adampencev
1 replies
1d2h

Reading this as a European (Czechia) feels surreal. Every time a merger or an acquisition takes place, it has to get approved by the anti-monopoly bureau and it’s not uncommon they deny it or request some changes to the ownership structure.

palata
0 replies
1d2h

The US don't (seriously) do antitrust, that's a problem indeed.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK
1 replies
1d2h

That's what Warren Buffett calls "moat". These are the companies one should invest in.

amai
0 replies
7h7m

Investing in monopolies was always profitable. It just destroys the market. There should be a law that disallows investments into monopolies. But such a law doesn’t exit. Everyone just cares about her/his own profits. In the end most of society is suffering from high prices and stagnation and a few are making huge profits. Everyone hopes to belong to the few ones. This unlimited greed will destroy our society.

toomuchtodo
0 replies
1d1h

Is anyone interested in working together building a non profit to bid for and replace the Versign .com operational contract mentioned? Think Let’s Encrypt for the domain registry.

mistermann
0 replies
1d4h

I'd be surprised if there is a single person in this comment section who would not defend to the death the root cause of all of this: fake democracy.

I used to hate Moloch, and hope for him to die, slowly. I've given up and switched sides: I now cheer him on, I may be his very biggest fan. You all deserve what you get, and I hope it gets even worse. I hope your enjoyment level on this planet reaches parity with that of the people of Palestine.

PS: I am very sorry for being political, I will try really hard to improve. After all, none of this is really a big deal, I am personally doing quite nicely for myself thank you very much so why should I complain? It is not rational. I will try to be more rational.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMr8FGyBL/

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMr8FgQeE/

jensenbox
0 replies
1d4h

Adobe

gmuslera
0 replies
1d4h

Termites or some kind of blood-sucking parasite? Something bigger than fleas, maybe ticks? The effect is different, and ones are meant for i.e. buildings and the other for living thing.

I see that as taxes, imposed by some private entity instead of the government, and without potential benefits for you as some taxes may be.

And if is that role, there are more direct imposed players that somewhat suck money to let the system work, starting with some banking and insurance.

deskr
0 replies
1d3h

I think this will definitely fuel the maker movement.

Inevitably, some of those makers will start up a business. Small scale at first, but some might grow. I don't know if it'll grow into a real threat though.

But I do know that most of MBA Termites I know don't give a damn if their current workplace tanks. As long they'll hit their bonus targets for the year, they are good.

https://makercity.com/book/factoids/

baxtr
0 replies
1d2h

I learned this too late in life. You basically have 2 choices.

Either you spend your time working for someone to increase the value of their asset. You get paid a salary, sometimes a very decent one. This is what society trains you for.

Or you own assets.

amai
0 replies
7h19m

tldr; „Where did these economic termites come from? We decided four and a half decades ago that monopolies were good. After 1998, the Antitrust Division stopped bringing monopolization cases, and in 2005, the Supreme Court unanimously endorsed monopolization as foundational to the health of American economy. After twenty years of not bringing cases, business executives realized the best way to run a business was to create a tollbooth in some mostly unnoticed part of society. So now, each supply chain is made up of a bunch of different bottlenecks, too small to notice.“

VyseofArcadia
0 replies
1d3h

I used to work for a competitor to AutoDesk. Popular opinion was that we had, at least in a few key areas, a genuinely better product, but it was pretty discouraging trying to make headway against "but I already know Revit".

Vendor lock-in in professional tools is an interesting topic. Sometimes it is active and malicious, but often it's just the natural tendency to keep using the tools you already know how to use.