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Interesting article. I thought Bezos was just another greedy, power-mad megalomaniac. That he's also a dewy-eyed Trekkie who rationalizes his greed with dreams of space colonization makes it even sillier. Who knew Gene Roddenberry was more dangerous than any economic theorist?
I like this detour into economics: > Bezos’s enterprise upends long-held precepts about the fundamental nature of capitalism—especially an idea enshrined by the great Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek[, who] argued that no bureaucracy could ever match the miracle of markets, which spontaneously and efficiently aggregate the knowledge of a society. > Amazon, however, has acquired the God’s-eye view of the economy tha…
Maybe this is what you were drawing attention to, but that part of the article misinterprets centralised planning. What it describes is the logistics of getting something from one place to another. Centralised planning is when a government planner decides the source, the destination and the good without giving final power to a consumer. Amazon doesn't have the final word on what people buy (or the destination of good…
Amazon is logistics, takeover would give the public a more extensive USPS plus digital infrastructure... it's not a revolutionary seizure of the means of production.
I am a sci-fi enthusiast like Bezos, however he seems to cherry pick the themes that he likes to apply to himself and Amazon e.g. driving mankind towards the stars and solving energy crises. There are however plenty of dystopian concepts in science fiction which his company seem to be propelling us toward: * Compression of labour wages by replacing/augmenting with robots. * Building an evil mega-corp (think Tyrell, L…
It's almost like a weird form of localized entropy reduction. Driving improvements in some areas whilst externalizing damage in others.
I like this detour into economics: > Bezos’s enterprise upends long-held precepts about the fundamental nature of capitalism—especially an idea enshrined by the great Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek[, who] argued that no bureaucracy could ever match the miracle of markets, which spontaneously and efficiently aggregate the knowledge of a society. > Amazon, however, has acquired the God’s-eye view of the economy tha…
Maybe this is what you were drawing attention to, but that part of the article misinterprets centralised planning. What it describes is the logistics of getting something from one place to another. Centralised planning is when a government planner decides the source, the destination and the good without giving final power to a consumer. Amazon doesn't have the final word on what people buy (or the destination of good…
I think it's worthwhile to re-read the passage I quoted:
>Hayek[...] argued that no bureaucracy could ever match the miracle of markets, which spontaneously and efficiently aggregate the knowledge of a society.
This isn't just about physical logistics. Hayek is arguing that no centralised agent has perfect information. The author is arguing that Amazon is approaching the stage when it would have perfect information about the consumers it serves.
>Amazon doesn't have the final word on what people buy (or the destination of goods for that matter) so it isn't a centrally planned system in that sense.
Even if it doesn't have the final word, it does have quite a bit of say in the form of its recommender system.
Also, "communism" in the sense of Marx -- one of the two senses in which I was using the word -- is not necessarily a centrally planned system. Rather, it's an idealisation of what an economy would become if it achieved 100% automation, i.e. an economy operating at 100% efficiency.
You can see it in the structure of Marx's "historic materialism" argument: just as capitalism had displaced feudalism because it's more efficient, socialism would then displace capitalism, and communism would do the same for socialism. In Marx's hierarchy of efficiency:
Feudalism So a communist economy, in Marx's sense, is also an economy in which there's perfect information. That can't possibly happen in the real world, of course, and Hayek correctly points this out about a centralised bureaucracy. But he's wrong about markets; no market is 100% efficient or operates in an environment of perfect information either.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe this is what you were drawing attention to, but that part of the article misinterprets centralised planning. What it describes is the logistics of getting something from one place to another. Centralised planning is when a government planner decides the source, the destination and the good without giving final power to a consumer. Amazon doesn't have the final word on what people buy (or the destination of good…
The article also misinterprets Marxism/communism. Amazon is logistics, takeover would give the public a more extensive USPS plus digital infrastructure... it's not a revolutionary seizure of the means of production.
>it's not a revolutionary seizure of the means of production.
The revolutionary bit of Marxism was a political sideshow for Marx's anarchist supporters. The economic theory of Marx does not require a revolution, because according to that theory, the superior mode of economic production should eventually prevail.
That is why you have political movements like democratic socialism and social democracy. These are moderates who believe that Marx's theory of economic progression is correct, but who also believe in incremental change.
Interesting article. I thought Bezos was just another greedy, power-mad megalomaniac. That he's also a dewy-eyed Trekkie who rationalizes his greed with dreams of space colonization makes it even sillier. Who knew Gene Roddenberry was more dangerous than any economic theorist?
> greedy, power-mad megalomaniac Why do you think that of him?
I am a sci-fi enthusiast like Bezos, however he seems to cherry pick the themes that he likes to apply to himself and Amazon e.g. driving mankind towards the stars and solving energy crises. There are however plenty of dystopian concepts in science fiction which his company seem to be propelling us toward: * Compression of labour wages by replacing/augmenting with robots. * Building an evil mega-corp (think Tyrell, L…
Interesting article. I thought Bezos was just another greedy, power-mad megalomaniac. That he's also a dewy-eyed Trekkie who rationalizes his greed with dreams of space colonization makes it even sillier. Who knew Gene Roddenberry was more dangerous than any economic theorist?
> greedy, power-mad megalomaniac Why do you think that of him?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> greedy, power-mad megalomaniac Why do you think that of him?
You have to be fantastically greedy to work so hard and for so much time to get an unfathomable quantity of money and keep going. I suppose there is nothing intrinsically wrong, but there is no need of Freud to tell us that greed is a very strong motivation to him.