241–250 of 461 posts
And winner-still-takes-all... some extremely large corporations were made in the last 15 years.
Sorry, don't see the difference between then and now.
I appreciate you attempting to identify the cause of our current crisis, but alas, I believe you may be too entrenched to find it.
And winner-still-takes-all... some extremely large corporations were made in the last 15 years.
Sorry, don't see the difference between then and now.
I appreciate you attempting to identify the cause of our current crisis, but alas, I believe you may be too entrenched to find it.
The thing to me is Silicon Valley is the place in the US that still looks like that post WWII America. Large monopolies like Google, Apple and FB utilizing fantastic profits and paying amazing perks to employees. Everyone working in and on the same mission acting as a social fabric tying people together. Glass Door and the Internet in general replacing trade unions by helping balance a knowledge imbalance so that wor…
(I'm also not sure if Google or Facebook are either, but at least in those cases it's obvious what you mean)
For the last 40 years, we were promised a better living standard in exchange for lower taxes. It backfired. We forgot about the vice that has no bounds - greed. That's why we have to set limits. Paul alludes to the correct and only solution - make tax rates so high to discourage accumulating wealth beyond a certain point.
It's a wave, but the wave has crested. Tax rates will rise, the loopholes will be removed, and the existing tax laws will start to get enforced. Too bad, it could have been different.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a fair question, and not one that can be easily answered in am HN comment. Personally, I would have had no problem with CU if it had remained the narrow decision that John Roberts originally wanted it to be. Clearly, if the First Amendment protects Michael Moore's right to make and show a politically charged film close to an election then it protects Citizens United's right to do the same thing. The problem ca…
When a for-profit corporation exercises free speech, it is actually the speech of its shareholders. Therefore, in the case of corporate speech it's still a group of individuals talking. The only thing you could do is put an individual limit on spending, which is then translated into a limit on corporate speech by summing up the limits of the shareholders, with foreign shareholders contributing zero, and domestic ones…
No, it's the speech of the management. The shareholders only have indirect control. The only power they generally have is to replace board members. And sometimes they don't even have that. Google, for example, is completely controlled by Larry and Sergey. Facebook is completely controlled by Zuck.
"And as long as it's possible to get rich by creating wealth, the default tendency will be for economic inequality to increase." This seems to be the ontological point of his essay, which reads as a loosey historical narrative manufactured to defend his belief that the fight against "economic inequality" will undermine innovation by disincentivizing the next Zuckerberg. But it misses the underlying point of wealth cr…
> his essay [...] reads as a loosey historical narrative manufactured to defend his belief that the fight against "economic inequality" will undermine innovation by disincentivizing the next Zuckerberg Well put. The argument that general taxation disincentives innovation has never made any sense to me: no matter how high the tax rate, your post-tax income still scales linearly with your gross income. If your object i…
I'm not convinced 'fragmentation' is the best way to summarise these trends. Small businesses are in fact still losing ground and importance to larger businesses (see for example http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/running_small_business/...). What definitely is happening compared to the mid 20th C is that the economy is more complex and thus there are more diverse industries represented in government, and also the lifespan of large companies is reduced, particularly as technology advances faster now than ever before. Jobs are also becoming ever more centralised in cities due to their increased need for direct communication which hasn't been countered by technology yet (despite a minor trend for remote work). These are the major trends for me.
I'd also add that while networks of smaller companies may have some innovation advantage over large companies (depending on the industry and innovation), many are focussed on industries where they can reduce labour rights, safety standards, avoid tax and lower wages e.g. in construction industry subcontracting, clothing manufacturing, hardware manufacturing, etc.)
Whats also glossed over here is the advances to society made through mechanisms which aren't people trying to get rich, or seek a 'market price' for their 'wealth creation'. Lets not forget that most of the true computer pioneers were people in the corner of some university or military institution somewhere. Similarly in medicine and most sciences, research which is not profit-driven has been core to much of the 'wealth' of the 20th century across the world.
Furthermore I think it's very important to differentiate between total wealth and wealth distribution. Some (probably rather right-wing politicians) advocate total wealth creation and others (rather left-wing politicians) promote (equal) wealth distribution. Economically speaking the former is clearly preferable, while for social cohesion the later is clearly preferable. Which way we go is (hopefully) up to the democratic electorate (ie. you). And should that not be the case, then at the very least we can all agree that fixing the democratic (legislative) process must be our very first priority - no matter if you seek more or less taxation.
The thing to me is Silicon Valley is the place in the US that still looks like that post WWII America. Large monopolies like Google, Apple and FB utilizing fantastic profits and paying amazing perks to employees. Everyone working in and on the same mission acting as a social fabric tying people together. Glass Door and the Internet in general replacing trade unions by helping balance a knowledge imbalance so that wor…
If you need skilled workers and the varying skill of a worker produces magnitudes of difference in wealth created of course you need to both be huge enough to afford them and centralized enough to take advantage of them.
The article itself seems like a blinders on interpretation of the US tech industry. Corporate consolidation is at all time highs in areas like food processing, farming, finance, raw materials, and industry. Mom and pop shops the world over are bellying up for Walmart and Starbucks. Startups and creative culture in the tech bubble are against the general grain. Its why money in politics is being considered such a larger problem now than twenty years ago - as dozens of economic effects interact, from people having less spending money to companies consolidating and having guaranteed revenues to regulatory meddling in their favor.
Fundamentally I think that newer generations growing up on the Internet are turning out much more hive minded than their grandparents, because there are just more of them as a fraction of the population. The perfect white nuclear family of 1970 still only accounted for a stark minority of the American public - it is just strange that a disproportionate number of people on HN ended up coming from that class. There was still extreme social unrest throughout the century - prison camps for the Japanese, the KKK, segregation, and the banning of many chemicals due to being "foreign" like opium and marijuana. Just because one microcosm of the American economy that produced most of us was homogenistic doesn't mean the era was exclusively defined by it.
