Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Seven Fixes for American Capitalism

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 146 posts

Re: Seven Fixes for American Capitalism

#81

Post by salawat »

komali2 wrote: post #64

>Among their recommendations is preventing tech platforms from vertically integrating into different lines of business, where they can potentially favor their own services and harm rivals. In this view, Facebook shouldn’t be allowed to own Instagram. Weird, I would argue that Facebook buying Instagram was a horizontal integration. Amazon buying cloudflare is more something I'd think is vertical but it's possible I ju…

I don't know why you arr being downvotes, but your understanding is consistent with mine.

Although I still think the Instagram acquisition was at some level also vertical since one could argue Instagram was a more efficient delivery conduit for a certain subset of the population, and what Facebook was really out for was to pad their datasets.

Re: Seven Fixes for American Capitalism

#82

Post by dang »

chasd00 wrote: post #80
komali2 wrote: post #64

>Among their recommendations is preventing tech platforms from vertically integrating into different lines of business, where they can potentially favor their own services and harm rivals. In this view, Facebook shouldn’t be allowed to own Instagram. Weird, I would argue that Facebook buying Instagram was a horizontal integration. Amazon buying cloudflare is more something I'd think is vertical but it's possible I ju…

the issue is you didn't directly attack Facebook and therefore are in violation of the groupthink de jour.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments like this to Hacker News. Even if you have a good point, it damages the quality of the thread.

Re: Seven Fixes for American Capitalism

#83

Post by dnautics »

mruts wrote: post #71
dnautics wrote: post #54

No mention of ending inflation, which is a deliberate state-driven policy to steal from the poor to give to the rich and make the state "look good" by lowering the metric of unemployment: https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-hi... "even in the long run, it’s really, really hard to cut nominal wages. Yet when you have very low inflation, getting relative wages right would require that a significan…

What are you talking about? The point of inflation is to encourage the spending and investment of money. It doesn’t really have anything to do with unemployment.

Fine, if that's what you believe is the point of inflation. Whom does "investment" benefit? Go down to the tenderloin in SF, look around, and ask yourself if these people are benefitted by 'investment'. And the mechanism, as indicated in the quote, has at least a side effect of lowering the real value of workers (his words, not mine) wages.

Inflation is exactly stealing from the poor to give to the wealthy. There's a reason why the income gap turned in mid 70s when Nixon closed the gold window; we can never hope to fix income inequality with linear downward redistributive policy until the compounding, upward redistribution is stopped.

Re: Seven Fixes for American Capitalism

#84

Post by posterboy »

clavalle wrote: post #18
simplecomplex wrote: post #13

Anti-trust isn’t equipped to deal with anything because it’s arbitrary and vague. “You’re too big because some bureaucrats said so” is not law. That’s not justice. It’s totalitarian. How can a company avoid breaking the law if they don’t know they’re breaking it?

It's like a law against harrassment...it requires human judgment. Some harassment is obvious. Some depend on perspective. Enforcing harassment laws can still be justice even though it is arbitrary and vague. Hell, if laws weren't arbitrary and vague depending on circumstance, we wouldn't need lawyers and courts!

That's just saying it's the decisions that are arbitrary, not the rules.

OP implies that judgement should be not just within the limits of the law, but dictated by it.

Truly, the cut off where a law's guidance ends and judgement begins is rather arbitrary. Exegesis of law is difficult. OP takes the principled stance that law exists to conserve the power of governance (totalitarian). You take the stance that judges are arbiters (arbitrariness). That's no contradiction. In a perfect world, every body could excert their will arbitrarily. Practically though, individual wishes are mutually exclusive. Thus, totality is impossible, and harrasment prossecution e.g. only a retarded (too slow) meassure. Even totalitarianism has to make ammends (assuming e.g. it would want to abolish perversely incentivized harrasment for good) and it's therefore a misnomer. That the law has or tries to have in effect a monopoly on power (I'm translating loosely from German Gewaltmonopol, where Gewalt is power, violence, force ...) as the dominating institution in the market might be just a liberal thing. If the invisible hand of the market works, that's not a bad thing. If dismantling monopolies were a bad thing, OP's shallowly underhanded call for opposition to this monopoly woud be just too ironic. It's downright paradox, although I might be missing a few presupposed assumptions.

Re: Seven Fixes for American Capitalism

#85

Post by mindslight »

dnautics wrote: post #54

No mention of ending inflation, which is a deliberate state-driven policy to steal from the poor to give to the rich and make the state "look good" by lowering the metric of unemployment: https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-hi... "even in the long run, it’s really, really hard to cut nominal wages. Yet when you have very low inflation, getting relative wages right would require that a significan…

From the OP:

> The real constraint only kicks in when there’s too much spending relative to a limited supply of goods and services—in other words, when inflation spikes. And there’s been little sign of that in America for decades.

It amazes me that this can still be repeated with a straight face. The prices for housing, healthcare, and education have skyrocketed - many would say that the costs for these are the problem.

What is happening is that technological and economic progression are continually trying to lower the prices of consumer goods. Rather than let this natural deflation occur, the overt monetary policy is to inject new money in the consumer sector until average prices rise instead.

But this money isn't given directly to consumers as cash, but only supplied as loans through financing channels. People don't have an extra ten dollars to spend on groceries (which would make grocery prices rise), but an extra $1,000 to borrow and bid up financializable assets. The monthly payments to service the debt (sometimes called rent) are also mandatory, so their financial position becomes ever more dependent on continual income.

Re: Seven Fixes for American Capitalism

#86

Post by bryanlarsen »

magduf wrote: post #48
om33 wrote: post #9

It's not an issue of having good ideas. The issue is really about execution and consensus building. We need to stop propping up 'the choosen one' type leaders and we will see change. I want boring people elected ala Merkel. Starting all the way back from Clinton\Bush\Obama\Trump to AOC these leaders are the wrong fit to make change happen in polarized times. They are great for media rating but not much else. I want t…

As the other responder said, boring non-charismatic people do not get elected in the US for President. The Democrat Party has been trying this over and over and over, and losing easily-winnable elections as a result. The latest election with Hillary losing is the most visible example of this phenomenon: she had no charisma at all, and lost to someone who was extremely polarizing. It doesn't work this way in other cou…

When marking the ballot in a parliamentary election, people put the X beside the name of their chosen representative for their local district, but in practice that name often has very little impact on the vote. The party and its leader have far more sway in most voters' minds than the local representative.

Re: Seven Fixes for American Capitalism

#87

Post by underbluewaters »

joshuaheard wrote: post #10

The title implies Capitalism is broken. It's not. Capitalism has provided more benefits to more people than any other economic system in history. American Capitalism has produced the telephone, the automobile, the personal computer, the cell phone, the internet, and made us one of the richest countries in the world. A better title would be, Tweaks that can make American Capitalism Better.

Capitalism has ignored negative externalities for a long time, and now the bill is nearly due. The environment is devastated, climate change will disrupt the ecosystem services we take for granted, and inequality is giving rise to political turmoil.

A better title would be, How to save Capitalism before it's too late.

Re: Seven Fixes for American Capitalism

#88

Post by zozbot123 »

api wrote: post #58
nabnob wrote: post #45

I agree with some of the points being made in this article, but there's definitely better resources on this topic. The paper mentioned in the article, "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox", is very thorough and easy to read even for someone (like me) who doesn't have a background in economics. The key point made in that paper is that modern antitrust legislation only looks at price when determining whether a monopoly is harmi…

Another thing the pricing test favored by the Chicago School doesn't consider is the effect of consolidation on entrepreneurship. Huge consolidated companies become de-facto standards that are hard to compete with for many many reasons and that have the resources to simply buy or clone any competitor in its crib. In the computing world they also tend to become platform monopolies with strong lock-in from APIs and net…

It's weird to me to see a narrow "pricing approach" towards antitrust being attributed to the Chicago School. I thought the Chicago perspective on antitrust was that it should potentially be applied to markets that aren't "contestable" (i.e. have high barriers to entry) for either structural or regulatory reasons, and in particular, that well-designed regulation could be used in such cases to minimize and constrain the non-contestable portion of a complex, multi-lateral market structure (see e.g. the markets in energy, telcos and the like - IT does not seem all that different), while "carving out" new, more contestable markets that could then sustain a lesser regulatory burden. This seems quite close to the power-focused approach that the "critics" are pursuing, and it's weird that they're being characterized as anti-free-market.

Re: Seven Fixes for American Capitalism

#89

Post by kadendogthing »

merpnderp wrote: post #72
kadendogthing wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What is reasonable? I think not having a continual decline in purchasing power and living standards despite increases in productivity and consistent technological breakthroughs is pretty reasonable.

Is that reasonable when heath-care costs, at 20% of the economy, are increasing at 10+% a year? The economy is not growing even close to fast enough to offset this. Our productivity is not increasing even close to fast enough.

>Is that reasonable when heath-care costs, at 20% of the economy, are increasing at 10+% a year?

Yes.

One, because cash flow one way doesn't justify cash flow another way. Regardless of other costs. So I'm not sure how one relates to the other. Purchasing power and real wages don't necessarily mean you have more money to spend freely. It's a way of looking at how average workers are getting their slice of the pie, so to speak.

Two, because the fundamental reason these costs are increasing are also because of the economic system that is hoarding wealth -- the product of productivity -- into one class tier. This class tier has almost no real input or contribution to productivity and technological advancements, yet are quite literally the only ones benefiting from it.

Continuing, there is absolutely no reason for healthcare costs to have increased as much as they have. Not at current spending levels. I wish people would understand this. There is no fundamental, principle reason why healthcare costs go up except greed and the system we have chosen to implement. Price increases happen because you have private companies that have continually increased prices -- and in some cases taken drugs that used to be free and now charge thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, for products and services. A lot of which are funded directly by federal grants, and none of which the public receives returns on. Our ineffectual government (when it comes to regulatory matters) has done nothing to curtail this.

https://www-tc.pbs.org/prod-media/newshour/photos/2012/10/02...

and

https://www-tc.pbs.org/prod-media/newshour/photos/2012/10/02...

We have every ounce of data telling us "this system is wrong, it is not functioning by any metric" Yet a large portion of the populace doesn't care or continues to adhere to the mantra. It's not religious, it's an economic cult sprinkled with political astrology. Capitalism has its place. But it needs to be put back in its place, so to speak.

Re: Seven Fixes for American Capitalism

#90

Post by claudiawerner »

chasd00 wrote: post #34
fallingfrog wrote: post #30

You can buy and sell almost anything under capitalism. You can buy or sell property. You can buy or sell pieces of a company (stocks). You can buy or sell human labor. And the way that businesses make money is by essentially arbitraging some market, for example by buying something in one place and selling it somewhere where it is more expensive, or by buying labor and selling the products of that labor at a profit. B…

To me the concept of labor in socialism is outdated. Consider Facebook, do all the uses who generate the content and activity that gives Facebook its value count towards "labor" and therefore should participate in the rewards of that labor? If everything was still physical factories, staffed by humans, and creating physical widgets then I can at least understand the socialist view. However, in the current market labo…

>Consider Facebook, do all the uses who generate the content and activity that gives Facebook its value count towards "labor"

It is labour, so yes. What do you think the concept of labour in socialism is? Only then can we judge if it is inaccurate. For instance, Marx never excluded mental/information-work/management labour, and in fact he mentioned them specifically at many points.

Post reply on HN