Declining worker power vs. rising monopoly power: explaining recent macro trends • Hacker News Board

Re: Declining worker power vs. rising monopoly power: explaining recent macro trends

#151

Post by jimbokun » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:10 PM UTC

rmrfstar wrote: post #63

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #27

The big issue is supply and demand. With increasing automation and global supply chains, there is a huge amount of labor available relative to the need. In the past, a union strike at a plant would see a generous long-term contract and benefits for the workers. Now, it is likely for the plant to be moved or workers replaced with automation.

Larry Summers is simply not credible. This is an "oh fuck things are about to get out of hand, let's try to insert ourselves into the debate so we don't get locked out" paper. Here is Larry Summers from his 1998 speech "The Challenges of Success". " The world looks very different than it did at the beginning of this decade, a time when America was said to be in decline. It is now clear that America will grow faster i…

What did he get wrong in the excerpt you quoted?

Re: Declining worker power vs. rising monopoly power: explaining recent macro trends

#152

Post by julienfr112 » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:14 PM UTC

yogthos wrote: post #130

Marx literally wrote about this in Das Kapital over a 100 years ago laying out the mechanisms of capitalist consolidation: The splitting-up of the total social capital into many individual capitals or the repulsion of its fractions from one another, is counteracted by their attraction. This last does not mean that simple concentration of the means of production and of the command over labour, which is identical with…

Well, Marx predicted that : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit... . The exact opposite of what we are looking at.

Re: Declining worker power vs. rising monopoly power: explaining recent macro trends

#153

Post by kebman » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:16 PM UTC

deegles wrote: post #135

kebman wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because if you cannot offer anything of value, someone else will offer that value on your behalf, making you an extraneous cost which anyone in their right mind would want to remove. And then you are but a slave to whomever you are useful to, meaning whoever controls you, and whoever has the power, and who grants you the means to get those basic needs. If someone is giving you bread for free, you can be sure it's bec…

> If someone is giving you bread for free, you can be sure it's because they don't want you to rebell. There's no other reason you could think of to feed a hungry person? > That is why an economy must rely on the basis of voluntarily offering something of value. Because the alternative is literal enslavement. You don't see the irony in saying that a person must volunteer their value or be enslaved?

> There's no other reason you could think of to feed a hungry person?

Free individuals might give something out of benevolence. But a state institution is not a free individual. It can only represent the collective, and you cannot ensure that all individuals in such a collective would agree to such an exchange, or feel benevolent about it. As such, there is no such thing as a benevolent state. Instead, you can employ game theory on such entities, to the extent of making them look completely self-serving and even psychopatic, as proven by Nash.

This is why it is so important to curtail the development of big and monolithic bureaucratic organisations, and instead use such principles as those given by Montesquieu, to make natural powers compete for authority.

> You don't see the irony in saying that a person must volunteer their value or be enslaved?

Do you think the person giving you bread should be forced to give you that bread? Nay, it would be far better if there was some kind of mutual exchange. There is none to be had, when the exchange is merely giving out a resource for "free." Except we know that it's not for free, but in return for your good behaviour. Then the exchange isn't free, but depending on an exchange anyway, except you have little to no say in it. Then the one in power of that resource in turn also have absolute power over you. So there should be a way for you to gain that power for yourself, or in the least make sure the one giving you bread does not have monopoly in doing so, because it will inevitably devolve into abuse of power.

Re: Declining worker power vs. rising monopoly power: explaining recent macro trends

#154

Post by aj7 » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

baby wrote: post #127

jakozaur wrote: post #45

In almost all USA industries, there is increasing amount of consolidation. The top 4 companies' in almost any industry has a larger share of the total market: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/03/26/too-much-of-a-... Some consolidation is natural, but a huge part is caused by mergers and acquisitions (M&A) fulled by Private Equity. The M&A benefits the shareholders of participating companies at the expense of c…

Watching Super Size Me 2 you realize that the same thing happened to the chicken industry. It’s frightening. It’s like we have a democracy (so far) and under that a lot of smaller authoritarian organizations that are hard to notice or dismantle. Some of the farmers were basically slaves, in huge debts to these companies way of running things. Unbelievable.

Corporate governance is authoritarian. Period.

Re: Declining worker power vs. rising monopoly power: explaining recent macro trends

#155

Post by sudosysgen » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:18 PM UTC

ls612 wrote: post #133

kgin wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a fascinating thing to realize that policymakers consider zero unemployment to be too low. The economy is built on the idea that some people at the bottom will be desperate enough to keep minimum wages low.

Zero unemployment would be bad because it would imply there’s no churn of people leaving one job for another. Back last year when unemployment was 3.5% most of that is people choosing to leave a job to find a new one.

It is not necessary to be unemployed for an extended amount of time in order to change jobs.

Re: Declining worker power vs. rising monopoly power: explaining recent macro trends

#156

Post by nostrademons » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:19 PM UTC

deegles wrote: post #135

kebman wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because if you cannot offer anything of value, someone else will offer that value on your behalf, making you an extraneous cost which anyone in their right mind would want to remove. And then you are but a slave to whomever you are useful to, meaning whoever controls you, and whoever has the power, and who grants you the means to get those basic needs. If someone is giving you bread for free, you can be sure it's bec…

> If someone is giving you bread for free, you can be sure it's because they don't want you to rebell. There's no other reason you could think of to feed a hungry person? > That is why an economy must rely on the basis of voluntarily offering something of value. Because the alternative is literal enslavement. You don't see the irony in saying that a person must volunteer their value or be enslaved?

> There's no other reason you could think of to feed a hungry person?

It's not what you can think of that matters, it's what the people who control the state apparatus can think of.

The vast majority of human beings are capable of empathy. Such people are usually found towards the bottom to middle of most hierarchies, because their empathy makes it painful to fuck over all the other claimants and collateral damage that they need to crawl over to get to the top.

You could look at capitalism is a sociopath-containment vehicle. If there were no sociopaths, there would be no need for capitalism: people would produce what was needed and freely share it with the people who need it most. However, there are sociopaths, and throughout history they've usually just taken all the excess production, enjoyed it, and left the people who produced it destitute. It was a big innovation to be able to channel that selfishness and will to dominate other people into productive uses that make the rest of society more efficient.

Re: Declining worker power vs. rising monopoly power: explaining recent macro trends

#157

Post by markus_zhang » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:21 PM UTC

alexose wrote: post #142

I find it very disappointing that the most reliably lucrative career arc for a programmer nowadays is to get hired by a tech giant and stay there as long as possible. And the second most is probably to go to work for a company that could get gobbled up by a tech giant. I've made a career out of small startups, and I wouldn't trade it for a thing. On the other hand, if I'd gone to work for Amazon straight out of colle…

Was not the case for most careers out there? If you want a comfortable 9-5 job you generally join a giant and stay as long as possible.

Re: Declining worker power vs. rising monopoly power: explaining recent macro trends

#158

Post by technotony » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:22 PM UTC

jtr1 wrote: post #137

baby wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watching Super Size Me 2 you realize that the same thing happened to the chicken industry. It’s frightening. It’s like we have a democracy (so far) and under that a lot of smaller authoritarian organizations that are hard to notice or dismantle. Some of the farmers were basically slaves, in huge debts to these companies way of running things. Unbelievable.

This is an argument a lot of non-authoritarian socialists make: democracy only governs the few hours when people are not sleeping or at work, so a deeper, fuller democracy would include running workplaces democratically as well. Whether by employee-elected boards, cooperatives, democratically run unions (a necessary distinction), or some other form of collective control, that the consent of the governed is a question…

This comes up a lot, nobody is literally chained to their desks. Democracy in the workplace comes from voting with your feet and taking another job at another company. It's not perfect, particularly for lower income people, but it's also not slavery and generally the arc of worker rights is improving through time.

You could make a case that some of the current anger in the united states is because COVID's destruction of the economy has removed that freedom to switch jobs (as the jobs have gone) demonstrating how important it is.

Re: Declining worker power vs. rising monopoly power: explaining recent macro trends

#159

Post by supernova87a » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #27

The big issue is supply and demand. With increasing automation and global supply chains, there is a huge amount of labor available relative to the need. In the past, a union strike at a plant would see a generous long-term contract and benefits for the workers. Now, it is likely for the plant to be moved or workers replaced with automation.

I agree with this very much. Despite the observations (and people's incorrect intuition about tight labor, before this virus at least), there is a surplus of willing labor to do work. To the extent that part-time gig work has become a necessity for people to stay afloat. You cannnot fundamentally change the situation or get wages/labor power to increase by restricting who can work, artificially raising wages, etc. The mass action of people numbers is hard to counteract, and as long as there are way more people than required for the demand for labor, we will be in this situation.

Re: Declining worker power vs. rising monopoly power: explaining recent macro trends

#160

Post by bedhead » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

lanevorockz wrote: post #59

Trying to break the conditioning here but government should always tax in a way that it incentive WORK. The way things are Wealth is no longer being produced, so those who have it will be on top because income will never be enough to prop you up. Therefore we should want a Growth market so that more wealth is produced and risk averse people will still be rich but more people will become as rich as them. To resolve In…

I've long argued for massive estate taxes on the very rich that forces a partial reset on wealth and avoid medieval times when land ownership was just passed down generation to generation. It's the only fair and practical wealth tax I can think of. I have no problem at all with Bezos being filthy rich, however, I have a giant problem with his kids and all descendants being billionaires. A huge estate tax would also massively incentivize charitable giving as wealthy people donated money to avoid the government taking it all. I'm sure consumption would rise some also, but the more money you have the harder it gets to spend on consumption, hence many of today's problems. The point is, knowing it will mostly go to the government upon death, the extremely wealthy would be motivated to do stuff with the capital. I'm still baffled why no one has seriously floated this idea though.