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

#181

Post by fsckboy » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:39 PM UTC

deegles wrote: post #112

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…

Why should everyone have to work? We are 100% capable of creating a society where everyone's basic needs are met with the automation and technology we have today. The idea that a person is only worth something if they work needs to be deeply reexamined.

no reexamination necessary, I'm drawn to emulate and recommend the humans that work hard toward long term goals. I like when Darwinism shows tangible progress against entropy rather than producing viruses that leech off of life.

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

#182

Post by bhupy » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:40 PM UTC

rfulop wrote: post #76

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'm with this argument. Capital gains should at least be taxed as much as earned income.

I completely agree with this in theory, we ought to just make capital gains be taxed at the same progressive tax brackets as income.

That being said, how do we prevent people from just selling small amounts of capital every year, so as to stay below bracket thresholds?

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

#183

Post by rcoder » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:40 PM UTC

brenden2 wrote: post #147

vinhboy wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to see this in graph form. 100K+ COVID deaths, 15%+ unemployment, wide spread homelessness, unaffordable housing crisis, riots and curfew in every major American city. Google DJIA to see a graph of how this has affected the wealthy... I am not blaming the players (well some), but the game is rigged.

The Federal Reserve injected trillions of free money into the markets, so naturally they went up.

This IMHO defends, not defuses the preceding argument. When there was risk of the market crashing, the federal government injected trillions _into the market_. This primarily benefits those with significant capital investments, not those whose ability to provide for themselves and their families is tied directly to regular employment.

Small business, retail and service workers, and employees whose jobs can't be trivially moved online are in desperate straights right now. The Fed's action did almost nothing for them.

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

#184

Post by Frondo » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:40 PM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #145

pydry wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gucci doesn't control the police, no. People who shop at Gucci do. Do you think that they are not going to see the smashing of their favorite shop as an implicit threat against them personally? Gucci is a powerful symbol of unchecked gaudy wealth as much as it is a retail establishment. The handbags themselves aren't really the point, which they'd be the first to admit to.

We disagree on several things: I'm not sure anyone controls the police. They look a lot like self ruling autonomous entities to me. The mayor of New York, supposedly their boss, is in a conflict with NYPD, and is mostly losing, from what I hear. The current "looting" is in no way confided to Gucci type stores. All retail with anything of value is being plundered. But even in a world where the gaudy rich control the p…

I was reading this this morning, on the subject of "who controls the police," seems legit (the answer is, the economic elites, absolutely represented by Gucci patrons):

https://plsonline.eku.edu/sites/plsonline.eku.edu/files/the-...

> More than crime, modern police forces in the United States emerged as a response to “disorder.” What constitutes social and public order depends largely on who is defining those terms, and in the cities of 19th century America they were defined by the mercantile interests, who through taxes and political influence supported the development of bureaucratic policing institutions. More than crime, modern police forces in the United States emerged as a response to “disorder.”

> These economic interests had a greater interest in social control than crime control. Private and for profit policing was too disorganized and too crime specific in form to fulfill these needs. The emerging commercial elites needed a mechanism to insure a stable and orderly work force, a stable and orderly environment for the conduct of business, and the maintenance of what they referred to as the “collective good” (Spitzer and Scull 1977). These mercantile interests also wanted to divest themselves of the cost of protecting their own enterprises, transferring those costs from the private sector to the state.

> Maintaining a stable and disciplined work force for the developing system of factory production and ensuring a safe and tranquil community for the conduct of commerce required an organized system of social control. The developing profit-based system of production antagonized social tensions in the community. Inequality was increasing rapidly; the exploitation of workers through long hours, dangerous working conditions, and low pay was endemic; and the dominance of local governments by economic elites was creating political unrest. The only effective political strategy available to exploited workers was what economic elites referred to as “rioting,” which was actually a primitive form of what would become union strikes against employers (Silver 1967). The modern police force not only provided an organized, centralized body of men (and they were all male) legally authorized to use force to maintain order, it also provided the illusion that this order was being maintained under the rule of law, not at the whim of those with economic power.

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

#185

Post by nickff » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

scottlocklin wrote: post #108

No sane person should ever listen to Larry Summers again. This weasel looted America; even looted Russia with his pals at Harvard -anything he has to say that isn't a groveling apology for his life of treachery and destruction isn't worth listening to.

I'm not sure that Larry Summers would call the people at Harvard his 'pals'; my understanding is that Summers was forced out of his position there.

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

#186

Post by luckylion » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:42 PM UTC

rcoder wrote: post #167

technotony wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's not perfect, particularly for lower income people... I don't think many minimum-wage retail or service workers can just "vote with their feet" and easily get another job, especially if you don't consider major changes in location and hours to be a non-starter. For folks with kids, or who depend on public transit to get to work, "up and moving" isn't really an option. If you're one missed paycheck away from evi…

> Saying the arc of history improves overall cruelly glosses over the reality today for millions of Americans.

No it doesn't. Medical understanding and technology has gotten way better over the centuries, and people still die of things that could have been handled. Acknowledging progress doesn't imply perfection, but progress.

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

#187

Post by snarf21 » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

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…

The SEC and FTC have failed us. Even 2008 was largely fueled by M&A so banks could lever even harder.

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

#188

Post by cvlasdkv » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #143

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…

Well yeah usually the more fun job pays less. That’s just basic economics. Life is all about trade offs.

There is nothing inherent in "basic economics" that postulates that fulfilling or fun jobs pay less.

I also find the idea of "basic economics" laughable given how impossible economics is in the first place. I mean, yes, if you assume spherical cows...

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

#189

Post by jtolmar » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:46 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.

Labor is not as simple as supply and demand; a huge portion of a worker's value is in their knowledge and ability to train other workers. When they strike, they are unavailable to train replacements.

Most of the people reading this are likely to be tech workers, so imagine what it would be like to try to join a company that was on strike[1]. How do you log in to your computer? Where's the bug tracker? What are the current goals? Where is the code stored? What part of this code base is actually relevant to what you're doing? What five year old architectural decision means that you can't just do this the obvious way? How do you deploy code? How do you roll back deployments? How do you find the metrics for what went wrong? Imagine trying to figure out the answers to any of these questions without senior engineers around, and in fact nobody around except other strikebreakers with the same questions. When I was at Google it was generally accepted that a new hire would take 3-6 months before the were productive, and that was with considerable help from the rest of the engineers.

Tech is a particularly severe instance of this, but all labor is more complex than it appears on the surface. As any roboticist will tell you, the real world is overwhelmingly detailed.

[1] Don't do this by the way, it's called being a scab, and it's against your own long-term interests. If a strike in your industry succeeds, it raises the average conditions of people in your industry.

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

#190

Post by someguyorother » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:47 PM UTC

kebman wrote: post #153

deegles wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This seems to be a kind of mixing of two concepts. First, that "a state that is big enough to give you anything, is big enough to take it all away". And second, that being provided resources "for free" is a forced exchange because you don't have a say.

If the state was a dictatorship, then the point might apply. However, democratic states (to lesser or greater degrees) contain some measure of feedback; and that weakens both of the prongs.

Plainly speaking, a democratic state provides its people bread for free because that's what the people want. The state can't take it all away since it is responsible to the people, and the exchange isn't a one-sided forced deal because the people in the state's jurisdiction have collective power on the state itself.

If that power is the power of the ballot, then the mutual exchange could be seen through an adversarial lens to be "good behavior in return for free bread". But the consequence doesn't hold, as the state doesn't have absolute power over its people. The exchange is mutual because if either party reneges, so does the other party.

But the stronger that feedback is, the less the adversarial model works. Consider a community small enough to support a direct democracy along consensus lines. If the tech existed, such a community could create an automated bakery and then hand all of that bread to its members. Here the members govern themselves; there is no external power that arises out of the state and then unilaterally controls the people.

A larger state may be different, but that difference is a matter of degree. "The one in power of that resource" only has "absolute power over you" if you are not part of it.