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

#211

Post by wpietri » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 6:13 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…

And what kills me about this is it almost seems like the big tech companies are just grabbing up engineers to no purpose. When I hear stories about what people are actually doing at larger companies, it often seems somewhere between miniscule and just plain empty. And it's not like a lot of the people telling these stories don't understand that. But they're happy enough wasting a third of their day at that salary.

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

#212

Post by CapricornNoble » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #146

zozbot234 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Angry and frustrated people will always be vulnerable to provocation. We can't pretend that away, but we can't wish that away either. So both claims could be true in some sense, but agent provocateurs (acting under fictitious monikers such as "Antifa", "Anonymous/4chan" or the like) are clearly playing a key role.

I'd like to see a source for your "clearly". In fact, if it's that clear, I'd like to see more than one.

It's definitely not "clear", but...

https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/500605-antifa-and-a...

https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/500764-why-its-...

https://www.boston.com/news/national-news-2/2020/06/02/georg...

https://twitter.com/balleralert/status/1267366989825277952

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

#213

Post by brenden2 » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

rcoder wrote: post #183

brenden2 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 trivi…

Just FYI, I was agreeing with the parent (and I agree with you). QE is free money for rich people, and a big slap in the face to the poor.

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

#214

Post by Merrill » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

But why did worker power decline?

I think that a major factor is the increasing number of roles occupied by workers. Workers were easier to organize when large numbers performed similar job functions in large manufacturing industries. Now manufacturing that requires a large number of one type of worker has been offshored. The residual manufacturing is either highly automated, or it is producing a large array of higher-tech products requiring a wider variety of skill sets.

The new service economy also requires a vast number of different roles fitting into partially automated business processes. As the degree of automation shifts, roles change rapidly. This makes it difficult to engage in union bargaining to arrive at contracts that define wages and benefits for specific jobs.

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

#215

Post by dcolkitt » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 6:15 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…

Monopolization almost certainly is occurring. The left usually cites weak antitrust enforcement. The right usually cites regulatory barriers that make it expensive to compete without economies of scale. I actually think both sides are at least partially correct.

However what almost everyone overlooks is the demographic transition. The US, along with every other developed economy, is significantly older today than it was 40 years ago. And the fact of the matter is that an older work force almost certainly leads to an economy with larger, older firms.

Most entrepreneurial activity is disproportionately carried out by younger people. Young workers are much more likely to work for small, young, growing firms. That makes sense because they have longer horizons and can take more risks. Older workers, who have higher fixed expenses and are closer to retirement, prefer the stability of a stable, large company with low employee turnover.

Macroeconomists who have attempted to quantify this impact, generally find that the average firm age in an economy linearly increases with the average worker's age.[1] Since older firms, tend to be larger, slower growing, and less competitive, it's not wonder we've seen an increase in monopolization.

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w25382

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

#216

Post by _2d30 » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 6:15 PM UTC

RNCTX wrote: post #117

_2d30 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then if you want to help people build wealth that don’t have it, you make it much harder. I really feel like people need to look into land taxes a la Henry George: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George Taxing things like capital gains differently or implementing a generic wealth tax can actually hurt those we want to help to build wealth as well as incentivize things like expatriation of wealth. Can’t expatr…

Taxes are not punishment. Taxes exist because a certain amount of wealth is required to maintain a state. I understand that the financial/business world has been trying to convince people otherwise since the mid 1970s, but they are still as wrong today as they were then. Tax “fairness” is therefore simple. He who earns the most should pay the most. You cannot expatriate dollars. The currency is issued by the state an…

> Taxes are not punishment. Taxes exist because a certain amount of wealth is required to maintain a state.

Who is saying taxes shouldn’t exist here? I’m advocating for a specific form of wealth tax. I clearly believe taxes are necessary. As for them not being a punishment, this is clearly a silly semantic argument focused on trying to frame this emotionally. People respond to incentives and change their behavior when faced with incentives. Taxes change incentives. If a tax disincentives a behavior, this behavior will be done less. Get your moral policing out of here.

> Tax “fairness” is therefore simple. He who earns the most should pay the most.

Why earnings? Why should we tax people’s labor? Your definition of fairness is yours, not everyone else’s.

> You cannot expatriate dollars.

Jesus Christ, yes you can. It’s like you’ve never heard of offshore banks. Where does an idea like this even come up? Go see China’s issues with people expatriating capital and their middling success at preventing it with capital controls.

How someone can speak like this and not see the value of a wealth tax in the form of a land tax blows my mind. By the way, concerned with massive disparities in wealth? That’s all from housing which is of course built on what? Land. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_r...

Tax the shit out of land. The marginal value to a piece of land from the actions of its owner is minimal at best. People gaining wealth from land is the definition of rent seeking.

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

#217

Post by megaman821 » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 6:20 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…

It seems that all the forms of collective control you listed are perfectly legal. If the majority of workers prefer workplaces like that then those places will thrive.

What you are implying though, is that the government forces all workplaces to conform to your desired control scheme. So fuller democracy equals government limiting choice, as long as it is your desired choice.

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

#218

Post by kebman » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 6:21 PM UTC

someguyorother wrote: post #190

kebman wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 weake…

This is not a concept, but an observation. What you're talking about already exists. It's the capitalist cooperative, where people voluntarily come together to pool capital in order to build some company that produces things or services that are of benefit to the collective owners and/or their customers.

However, while the price of membership in such a unit decreases with every new participant, the ownership is also diminished with each new owner, until effective control over the unit or process becomes very difficult. This will inevitably lead to frustration and feelings of powerlessness as needed change is slowed more and more.

As the saying goes, more votes, does not necessarily mean more democracy. It simply means that it becomes harder to get anything done. Meanwhile, bureacracies grow and rule uninterrupted under such conditions, since a vote every fourth year, and the meddling of one or two representatives, can only ever make small and incremental changes, instead of giving the organization the far-reaching and overarching reorganization that it actually needs in order to become fair and effective again; a thing that is usually contested and opposed by those making up the bureacracy of that organization in the first place.

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

#219

Post by fein » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 6:21 PM UTC

brenden2 wrote: post #103

Aunche wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of people complain that not enough stores like Target open up in low income areas and riots are only going to make this worse.

For someone in desperation all I hear is further reason to riot and loot. Nobody cares about these people, and politicians keep going on TV saying how they're going to put everyone in jail or shoot them.

Statements and actions are two very different things, and as far as I can tell the rioters have the support of both corporations and the state, as absolutely nothing has been done to deal with the unrest.

That is, unless you start to cause trouble in the wrong neighborhood, then the police will absolutely take care of it: https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/nypd-...

I'm not sure why people are eating up the media lie idea that the government is some fascist entity supporting corporations, because the government's actions show that the rioters, politicians, corporations, and government (state and federal) are all on the same side.

Revolutionaries that signal on the same lines as Sony, Target, Walmart, Google, the state governments, and the federal government... It's honestly laughable how well this is orchestrated and how incredibly naive or stupid the people are that are eating it up for social brownie points.

The only people not being represented by anyone are the small business owners who don't wan't their homes and businesses eviscerated, and normal citizens who keep their heads down.

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

#220

Post by ericd » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

dangus wrote: post #166

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 is far beyond imperfect. Let’s say I work at Kroger. I don’t like the way I’m treated, so I quit. Now the remaining grocery stores I can work for owned by Albertsons or Amazon. What kind of choice is that? Pick any other industry and you’re likely to find similar problems. It would be really interesting to see what mandatory democratic corporate governance might look like. Or, perhaps, fixing union regulations so…

You’re not limited to grocery stores.

The fundamental problem is that there’s less demand for unskilled US labor than there are unskilled US laborers looking for work. Fix that, and most of the issues people are worried about go away.

That likely has to be solved at the federal or international government level.