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

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

voxeu.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 476 posts

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

#221

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#223

Post by danans »

neutronicus wrote: post #100
danans wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's lots of demand for labour, just not from people/companies/industries that have the means to the pay for it. I agree, but I think you mean income distribution and latent demand. The idea is that a lot of people would be consuming more goods and services if they weren't so cash strapped. Some of this is also affected by wealth distribution also, though.

Latent demand and wealth distribution interact strangely. There's a bunch of work no one wants to do that gets dumped on people who need the money by everyone who can afford it. Elder Care is an obvious examples in the US, along with Child Care to a lesser extent. Lots of people consume free or budget versions of these services with which they're dissatisfied, and the root of their dissatisfaction is often that they…

> I guess the flat-wealth-distribution case is most people grudgingly using some economy-of-scale option leveraging the people with more patience for this kind of work, and a few control freaks either doing it themselves or economizing elsewhere to pay for a boutique option.

That can be said of practically every industry. They are all segmented by cost/quality, whether that quality is real or perceived.

That said, the goal behind reducing wealth and income disparities isn't to flatten them completely, it's to put a floor under the standard of living of those at the bottom of the wealth/income distribution. That doesn't mean everyone will be consuming boutique products and services, but it means that latent demand, currently repressed by lack of income/wealth, will become active demand, and money velocity in the economy will increase.

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

#224

Post by viburnum »

Merrill wrote: post #214

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 highe…

Nope, it was a political battle that labor lost.

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

#225

Post by fsckboy »

luckylion wrote: post #203
fsckboy wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's not what he's saying. He's saying higher overall income, and it comes with lower risk than startups.

But that's also expected, isn't it? Startups are like playing the lottery, those that win will suddenly have much, much, much more than your average person that puts their money into savings instead. But a big part of those playing the lottery will never win, and on average those who just invest their money will be better off than those who play the lottery.

he's saying that the monopoly aspect earns more much's of money for more much's of people, and therefore it's much much more than the startup aspect is much more.

i.e. you can join a startup that is already successful (the winner has been picked, Amazon, Google, Uber, ...) and safely with less variance expect to gain more expected value than you'll on average get from trying to pick the next winner. If you say "but startups are win win" then I'll say "but he's saying monopolists are win win win"

Microsoft was already an OS monopoly by 1990, but after that is when it really started to make real money, and for a lot more people than had worked there in the 80's. Because monopolizing a niche industry is nothing compared to growing the monopoly to mainstream acceptance.

you don't have to agree with his assessment; I'm just trying to clarify that he is saying something, not just selecting a point on a gaussian.

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

#226

Post by Super_Jambo »

burrows wrote: post #206
chillacy wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you but substitute WORK for Value Creation. It's way to easy to "create jobs" which are essentially busy-work with 0 to negative productivity. In the coming decades, economic productivity will become more and more important as gains from elsewhere start to taper out.

> It's way to easy to "create jobs" which are essentially busy-work with 0 to negative productivity. If firms have workers with negative productivity, aren't executives incentivized to fire them? And if so, why are there negative-productivity workers?

Lots of executives aren't judged on their final contribution to the bottom line but the size of their 'empire' or project 'successes' they can point to.

There are also plenty of examples of work that is profitable to a company but that doesn't create value to consumers:

* Campaign Donations / Lobbying for favourable regulations.

* Softbank style monopoly creation (it's just moving investor money to consumers).

* Patent Trolls and lots of semi-patent trolling games. (Think Amazon buying Kiva)

* Misleading / Emotive advertising. (Which I'd argue is the majority of it.)

If you're hell bent on thinking markets are inherently fair you can contort yourself to show these things _can_ be productive but to think they're always productive?

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

#227

Post by alexose »

luckylion wrote: post #203
fsckboy wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's not what he's saying. He's saying higher overall income, and it comes with lower risk than startups.

But that's also expected, isn't it? Startups are like playing the lottery, those that win will suddenly have much, much, much more than your average person that puts their money into savings instead. But a big part of those playing the lottery will never win, and on average those who just invest their money will be better off than those who play the lottery.

I think you're 100% right, but it feels to me like the odds have just shifted over time. Early on it was more like the stock market, then it was like a roulette table, and now it's like gas station scratch tickets.

I'm not saying you can't get rich off of gas station scratch tickets, but it's not the best option.

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

#228

Post by tomp »

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.

We will never automate "basic needs" unless we automate medicine.

We'll never automate medicine because everyone wants to live even longer.

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

#229

Post by tekdude »

wpietri wrote: post #211
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.

I'll just share an anecdotal experience:

Earlier this year (before COVID), I interviewed with Microsoft, as they were looking for people with security clearances to work on Azure services. I apparently passed at least one of the four interviews, as they made me an offer. However... the offer contained minimal details on what I would be working on or doing, just a vague description that it was an Azure infrastructure service team. The recruiter himself didn't have any information to answer my questions. If I were just coming out of college, I'd be fine with that level of unknown, but as someone with about ten years of experience and who knows what he likes to work on, I wasn't going to take the risk of ending up on a miserably boring project (again).

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

#230

Post by AWildC182 »

rapsey wrote: post #177
AWildC182 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While tangential, it should be noted that creating jobs in Mexico and Canada will probably always be a net good for the US even if it means some net loss of jobs in the near term. Being closely connected with populous neighbors whom you can enrich such that they can buy your stuff will vastly strengthen the US's position as well as the NA bloc. We want manufacturing in mexico because we're connected by literal rail l…

> While tangential, it should be noted that creating jobs in Mexico and Canada will probably always be a net good for the US even if it means some net loss of jobs in the near term. Yeah the rust belt job loss is only temporary. They will come back any day now. > We want manufacturing in mexico because we're connected by literal rail lines and can ship products back and forth far more readily and in an environmentall…

I think this kinda bends the meaning of the argument a bit.

To put it differently, if we have to go with outsourcing, China was a mistake and we should redirect as much of what was offshored as possible to Mexico.

Obviously the billionaire class needs to pay for what has been done. I'm absolutely not against that.

Post reply on HN