Apparently this is true not only of the US but also of Japan.
I just finished watching a nice dram series called 'Shitamachi Rocketto' which might be of interest to folk on HN.
Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
271–280 of 353 posts
Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the thing though, that is exactly what a late stage "free market" looks like. What you need is a heavily regulated market that prevents exactly this behaviour. People need to stop wishing for the "free" market. The term is abused by orators and manipulators who prey on peoples desire for a market which is free in the spirit of the word, and deliver to them a market which is technically "free" and horrible.
The end state of free market (as in free of government regulation, not free to compete) is monopoly. Capitalist societies understand that and regulate to ensure freedom to compete. Europe is much better at this than the US.
> Europe is much better at this than the US.
By Europe, I think you mean 3 or 4 countries in all of Europe. Most countries in Europe entirely fail at what you're claiming and most are embarrassingly behind the US on: innovation, productivity, median incomes, unemployment, global & domestic corporate competitiveness, research spending (both public and private).
I wasn't aware that Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Belarus, Lithuania, Romania, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Bulgaria, Moldova, Serbia, etc. had such stellar economies, that functioned at a high level with excellent competition and dynamism.
The majority of nations in Europe are backwards, poor (often extremely poor), mediocre at competition, with terrible median incomes, terrible median household net worth levels, perpetual unemployment problems, and very stagnant innovation within their economies. The results - among the nations I listed for example - when it comes to GDP per capita, median incomes, unemployment, exports, etc. all speak very loudly.
Many of the nicer countries in Europe, have rigid economic systems that are narrow industry dependent, non-innovative and stagnant. That includes Norway, Denmark and Finland (which is trying to crawl out of a ten year near-depression, and is heavily dependent on ancient industries like paper production). France has had a stagnant economy for decades with hyper low growth, rigid is an understatement there; if they grow median wages at 1/4th the rate of the US, it's considered a good outcome.
Germany would be in the middle of a ten year recession, were they not free riding on their Euro neighbors when it comes to benefiting from an artificially cheap currency (cheap for them).
Europe is not better than the US at facilitating competition, a very select few countries in Europe may be (Sweden for one). Europe is overwhelmingly dominated by dynastic corporations, handed down through the generations (Europe overall has a far worse stagnant dynastic wealth score than the US), and have almost entirely failed to keep pace with the US when it comes to spurring very successful new companies in the last 30 or 40 years. That proof is in how far behind nearly all (not all, nearly all) European nations are in rapid innovation fields like software, Internet, mobile, AI, biotech, robotics, VR/AR, etc.
But feel free to list all the amazing Internet, biotech, robotics, AI, Mobile, etc. firms in the highly dynamic & competitive Russia or Greek or Spanish or Polish markets.
If I was wrong, the results, the economic standing, for all those nations I listed, wouldn't be so horrible. Poland wouldn't have a $13k GDP per capita; Russia's median income wouldn't be 1/5th that of the US; Spain wouldn't have 20% unemployment (still); Bulgaria wouldn't have a median income that's nearly at third world levels; and so on.
Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obamacare increased the cost of my families healthcare from $400 a month to $1800 a month, and now my family doesn't have long term healthcare insurance. So please keep telling me how it's better.
Another anecdata on the "worse for me" side... My income has been pretty irregular over the past few years. All but two months I've made $0. In two months I made many tens of thousands of dollars. I got denied for free coverage because of the two months I earned money. I got denied for purchasing through the exchange because my projected income was $0/mo. /me is an edge case, I guess. So, having some time off, I left…
Have you 'reported the bugs'?
Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the thing though, that is exactly what a late stage "free market" looks like. What you need is a heavily regulated market that prevents exactly this behaviour. People need to stop wishing for the "free" market. The term is abused by orators and manipulators who prey on peoples desire for a market which is free in the spirit of the word, and deliver to them a market which is technically "free" and horrible.
The problem in this particular case seems not to be too much freedom to buy and sell things but overreach by the courts. If some syringe supplier slips stuff into the small print that they will be the only supplier for ever after then the legal system should refuse to enforce that as is probably the case in most places outside the US.
> the legal system should refuse to enforce that
What you're asking for is the opposite is the opposite of what you're stating the problem is. The courts doing nothing but enforcing contracts is expected.
Asking for the courts to step in to say "while legal this isn't right and won't be enforced" is asking for 'more reach' by the courts.
Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Free market" implies "I can do what I want" I always though free implied free from non-consensual acts. It's not much of a free market if your actions are non-consensual (1). (1) Defining what makes an action consensual is difficult but doable.
The ability of consensual exchange to increase utility for both parties frays at the limits of the ability of the parties giving consent to predict the results of their decision. Our ability to express the inherent failings of consensual contracts requires us to understand the limits of our own predictive power, which turns out to be a monstrously difficult scientific question. However, it seems to me that, if one pa…
Fully agree. It wouldn't surprise me if acting 'scummy' was considered, by at least one party, to be non-consensual.
Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
The end state of free market (as in free of government regulation, not free to compete) is monopoly. Capitalist societies understand that and regulate to ensure freedom to compete. Europe is much better at this than the US.
> Europe is much better at this than the US. By Europe, I think you mean 3 or 4 countries in all of Europe. Most countries in Europe entirely fail at what you're claiming and most are embarrassingly behind the US on: innovation, productivity, median incomes, unemployment, global & domestic corporate competitiveness, research spending (both public and private). I wasn't aware that Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Poland, Hung…
If USA is so innovative and Europe so backwards how come USA has trade deficit with EU?
Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#277"I started a manufacturing company in Little Elm, about 35 miles north of Dallas, to produce the first-ever automatically retracting syringe to eliminate the risk of nurses contracting HIV through accidental needle sticks. The syringe received rave reviews from nurses, hospital executives and public health officials, a major grant from the National Institutes of Health and robust private investment. But when my partn…
Another element is that a monopolistic institution can often afford to wait until expiration of any promising patents and that appears to be a factor in this case as well:
At Retractable, "Shaw still isn’t any closer to breaking into the hospital market, and in the meantime the life on his patents is dwindling."
"So he has partnered with Chinese companies, which put up money to build assembly lines in China in return for permission to produce his syringes for the Chinese market. When his patents do run out, the Chinese manufacturers will be the ones poised to bring his technology to the world market, meaning all the jobs and economic benefits that could have gone to the local residents will instead go to the people of Gansu Province."
http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/julyaugust-2010/dirty-...
Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the thing though, that is exactly what a late stage "free market" looks like. What you need is a heavily regulated market that prevents exactly this behaviour. People need to stop wishing for the "free" market. The term is abused by orators and manipulators who prey on peoples desire for a market which is free in the spirit of the word, and deliver to them a market which is technically "free" and horrible.
'People need to stop wishing for the "free" market. The term is abused by orators and manipulators who prey on peoples desire for a market which is free in the spirit of the word, and deliver to them a market which is technically "free" and horrible.' Don't call it the free market. Call it what it is: COMPETITION. "Free market" implies "I can do what I want", but frankly we don't WANT people to be free to pull anti-c…
Yes, I can understand the desire to die on the "but the term as used correctly is what we want" hill. The far more pertinent fact is that just calling it 'the free market' allows others to advance their own concepts under the same guise (there's no regulators nor 'false advertising' when it comes to terminology differences) and you end up getting screwed.
Call it competition; refer to the literal changes it entails; use strong examples like the one above about safer needles. (My go-to was always airless tires till now; I'm sure we could compile a list of technology advancements we're sitting on but haven't adopted because of our LSC society.)
Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What you need is a heavily regulated market that prevents exactly this behaviour. That seems like the opposite of a solution. For such a system to work one has to believe that that the regulatory apparatus is staffed with monks who are unaffected by the temptations of wealth, power and vanity that other humans are subject to and that 'regulatory capture' isn't a real thing. Further that the price mechanism as an in…
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Yes, regulations aren't perfect. Yes, regulatory capture is a problem. Neither of those things is a reason to not have regulations. >>that corrupting it with noise will have negligable effect on efficiency and technological development What really hurts efficiency and technological development is monopolies. A company that is a monopoly has very little reason to innovate. We se…
He's not arguing for perfect, he's arguing for sustainable.
No system of regulations you build won't eventually be corrupted because (exactly as he says) there exists no neutral desireless arbiters in our world to enforce them.
No system of regulations you build WON'T get you back here eventually. [0]
Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#280> In 1994, at the height of the AIDS crisis, in which I lost several friends and a beloved employee to the disease, I started a manufacturing company in Little Elm, about 35 miles north of Dallas, to produce the first-ever automatically retracting syringe to eliminate the risk of nurses contracting HIV through accidental needle sticks. The syringe received rave reviews from nurses, hospital executives and public heal…
There's a link in the next paragraph to http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/julyaugust-2010/dirty-... which tells more of the story. Claim is that rule change allowed hospitals to join group purchasing organiations (GPOs) which could get their fees from vendors rather than buyers, essentially creating a system of kickbacks from dominant vendors, which could be large enough for GPOs and thus hospitals and thus patie…
Licensing the patent would further monopolize the syringe market. Her community would be better off if they had been permitted to manufacture and sell the product.