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

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

#461

Post by gnicholas »

learc83 wrote: post #452
OrangeKnucles wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP did not destroy the supporting evidence.

How so? The only supporting evidence provided was garbage collectors make more than teachers. The OP posted a link showing that's not true.

I never said that teachers should make less than garbage collectors because they enjoy psychic income. These two jobs are not generally substitutable in the eyes of potential employees, since they are so different. Sorry if I gave the impression that any job that enjoys psychic income would pay less than any other job — certainly this is not true.

For example, college professors receive psychic income, but they make much more than garbage collectors. They make less than stock brokers, which is another career option available to people who can get PhDs, in general.

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

#462

Post by Apocryphon »

blaser-waffle wrote: post #459
mc32 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HOAs too. As if municipal codes and such aren’t enough for people.

I've heard HOAs called "4th level of government" (fed / state / local / HOA)

The real Fourth Estate!

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

#463

Post by Frondo »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #451
Frondo wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The libertarian argument generally goes that competition will keep them all in check, but history has shown again and again how it doesn't work in the general case. If you want to see what small government/strong corporate control is like, look back a century in American history. Corporations controlled much more of American life than they do even now, and the 20th century regulatory state is all very much a direct r…

There's a way down the middle. Unions. Say a group of people unionized and formed a collective coop org. Workers would get paid fairly who were employed by the co-op and would be members of the union. The union would create it's own credit union and financial instruments and be a mesh of a CU and old style savings/loan. The CU/Bank aspect would also invest in real estate (section 8 housing mostly and other but try to…

Oh, I am all in favor of unions, and you're absolutely right. It's a tragedy, yet an unsurprising one, that business co-opted government to restrain union power the way it did.

In fact, in the "small government" vein, I'd suggest repealing Taft-Hartley immediately. The biggest immediate benefit to repealing that would be that unions could once again freely conduct wildcat strikes.

But that's not what libertarians generally think about when they think "small government," they think of ending social programs -- at least, in every conversation I've ever had with them. I've never had a one-on-one conversation with a libertarian (and I've had quite a few, thanks extended family) who thinks unions are a good thing or a way to balance corporate power.

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

#464

Post by Apocryphon »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #451
Frondo wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The libertarian argument generally goes that competition will keep them all in check, but history has shown again and again how it doesn't work in the general case. If you want to see what small government/strong corporate control is like, look back a century in American history. Corporations controlled much more of American life than they do even now, and the 20th century regulatory state is all very much a direct r…

There's a way down the middle. Unions. Say a group of people unionized and formed a collective coop org. Workers would get paid fairly who were employed by the co-op and would be members of the union. The union would create it's own credit union and financial instruments and be a mesh of a CU and old style savings/loan. The CU/Bank aspect would also invest in real estate (section 8 housing mostly and other but try to…

Digging this plan. It's an idealistic vision that actually has a roadmap for how to put these ideas into practice.

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

#465

Post by learc83 »

gnicholas wrote: post #461
learc83 wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? The only supporting evidence provided was garbage collectors make more than teachers. The OP posted a link showing that's not true.

I never said that teachers should make less than garbage collectors because they enjoy psychic income. These two jobs are not generally substitutable in the eyes of potential employees, since they are so different. Sorry if I gave the impression that any job that enjoys psychic income would pay less than any other job — certainly this is not true. For example, college professors receive psychic income, but they make…

>Sorry if I gave the impression that any job that enjoys psychic income would pay less than any other job — certainly this is not true.

That's not the impression you gave. You gave the impression that garbage collectors make more than teachers.

>This is widely cited as the reason that teachers earn less than other professions, and why garbage collectors earn more

Teachers I get now that you meant to say was

Teachers Garbage collectors > similar professions to garbage collectors

I've heard many arguments that teacher make less than X profession, so the former wasn't an unreasonable interpretation given the phrasing.

Knowing what you meant to say. I don't think garbage collector pay is good supporting evidence for psychic income. Garbage collector pays well because it is a physically unpleasant job. What's an example of a substitute job that is similarly physically unpleasant that pays less because people find it fulfilling?

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

#466

Post by jjoonathan »

WalterBright wrote: post #425
jjoonathan wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't call the government "a tool" used to suppress competition, you called it "the tool" used to suppress competition.

"the tool" meaning it was the first tool they reached for, not the only tool. For example, if I said "Star Wars" was "the movie" to see in 1977, I obviously did not mean it was the only movie. If I meant it was the only tool, I would have written "the only tool". If you need to insert the words "only", "always", "never", "100%" into my words in order to argue, you should reconsider the strength of your argument.

Nah, I heard what you said and you said what you meant.

Even so, I'm happy to engage with your new argument: that regulatory capture is the first tool companies reach for to unfairly suppress competition. That's still wrong. Regulatory capture is slow, unwieldy, and opportunistic. The first tool a company reaches for is typically either M&A or dumping.

When WhatsApp was getting popular, did Facebook respond by crafting legislation with a plausibly deniable dual purpose, cultivating connections with campaign contributions and a held-open revolving door, wait for a wave of public sentiment that could carry their law up the priority list, through congress, and onto the books, and then sit back and pray that the resulting wind blowing at their backs and in WhatsApp's face would tip the balance enough to keep them on the throne? No, of course not! Facebook bought WhatsApp. Where there were two competitors, a free market exchange happened, and then there was one competitor. See also: banks. Yeah, they need FTC approval, but the free-er the M&A market, the easier it is for competitors to just merge together, and the more anti-competitive the result.

As for dumping, you'll often hear people blame legislation for the big ISP monopolies we have. Certainly there are no shortage of legislative failures in this space, yet it's not illegal to start an ISP. If you set out to create an ISP of your own, you'll probably be able to find a municipality willing to deal with you. The actual trouble will appear when you start selling your service. Your first few customers will gladly switch in order to take advantage of the better deal you're offering, but once the regional ISP monopoly notices the churn, suddenly you'll find that all of your prospective customers recently received a promotional discount from the monopoly and are no longer interested in your service. Then you go out of business, and customer rates go back up. It wasn't a law that kept you out of the market, it was the fact that your competitor had a larger war chest.

In both cases, more market freedom = less competition. Certainly, regulatory capture also exists and is also a problem, and in that case more market freedom = more competition. In some cases, it's even more complicated: economies of scale create genuine value by amortizing costs across volume, but they also create an anticompetitve moat. They have good aspects and bad aspects that are inextricably linked and inseparable from each other.

Still, focusing exclusively on regulatory capture will lead you to misdiagnose most markets. The cure will appear obvious, but where your diagnosis is incorrect, it won't work.

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

#467

Post by andrekandre »

jtr1 wrote: post #430
andrekandre wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cooperatives dont necessarily "do worse" but they do face unique challenges compared to non-coops, the biggest being raising capital https://www.co-oplaw.org/finances-tax/financing/

In my limitied view, this seems to be one of the biggest obstacles. I'm heartened to see new cooperative investment funds coming online, like Evergreen Cooperatives ( http://www.evgoh.com ) and accelerators, like Start.coop (very new)

it really is needed, i hope they do well, and thanks for the links ^^

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

#468

Post by WalterBright »

Frondo wrote: post #392
Apocryphon wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what keeps corporations from becoming governments unto themselves?

The libertarian argument generally goes that competition will keep them all in check, but history has shown again and again how it doesn't work in the general case. If you want to see what small government/strong corporate control is like, look back a century in American history. Corporations controlled much more of American life than they do even now, and the 20th century regulatory state is all very much a direct r…

> The libertarian argument generally goes that competition will keep them all in check

The libertarian argument is that the proper role of government is to protect people from force or fraud being used against them.

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

#469

Post by Andrew_Quentin »

downerending wrote: post #408
wpietri wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A big problem with filthy rich outfits is that they can simply afford to do this. My two highest-paying jobs were almost sinecures. The teams were massively overstaffed, and it could be quite difficult to find productive things to work on. I spent a lot of time simply waiting, which is to say killing time. If your goal in life is to be rich, it's not bad, I guess. If you really love doing good tech, it's stultifying.

Are you a bot? Where do you find those stupid words? No wonder you're attracted to useless positions for status.

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

#470

Post by indigochill »

megaman821 wrote: post #288
Apocryphon wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another metaphor: "Linux is open and free, it can be a major desktop OS if everyone just switched to it, but because they haven't they obviously don't care for it."

Not to go off on a tangent but what you said is true, most people don't care about Linux...or Windows, or MacOS. They have a general apathy to whatever desktop OS they use, with a slight bias to whatever they used last. People just want to use the applications they want and need. Perhaps the same statement would apply to workplace control. Most people have a general apathy to their workplace governance and only care…

>I really don't know how you make people care about things

To follow your tangent, I actually did a little bit of not terribly formal research on this at one point (maybe about 15 years ago now), calling up a variety of people in different volunteer organizations and asking them about their background and motivation for their volunteer work.

Generally, the anecdotes I gathered all roughly corresponded with their volunteer work tying in in some way with other facets of their lives.

For example, a man who had received books in prison from a volunteer organization joined that organization after he got out because he believed in the value of what they were doing. A mom volunteered on an organization that arranged activities for kids, which hers participated in. That sort of thing.

My takeaway was not terribly revolutionary: you can't -make- someone care about things, but their circumstances will increase the chance that they will care about related things.

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