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

An Economy of Overfed Middlemen

mattstoller.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 160 posts

Re: An Economy of Overfed Middlemen

#141

Post by UweSchmidt »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #121
UweSchmidt wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Market forces on a commodified, non-monopolized playing field should come up with all that innovation and bring us that charging cord faster and cheaper, and/or through a wider variety of curated market places and organic charging cord communities.

"organic charging cord communities" I honestly cannot tell whether you're joking.

I tried to be a little concise. These days we mostly wonder which Amazon review is fake, and which product might be counterfeit. In the earlier days of the internet niche forums surprised with exciting and on-point information and initiative. Back to your charging cord example, a store could innovate and stand out by offering reliable off-brand alternatives for things like charging cords. Such innovation is less likely when a monopolist is holding on to most of the market share.

Back to my main point: The basic logistics of distributing products around the world should be equally good or better in a world without monopolists - theoretically, monopolies extract a surplus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly#/media/File:Monopoly-...), intuitively it's obvious ("why try when you don't have to").

Re: An Economy of Overfed Middlemen

#142

Post by lovich »

WalterBright wrote: post #140
lovich wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Can you show me a single successful enterprise that does not require any land? > Businesses often rent office space. Microsoft got its start from a rented building. As I mentioned before, Japan became a world economic power with very little land. South Korea is another example. South America has plenty of land, and is mired in poverty. Just to be clear, I am taking that as no, you cannot show a single successful e…

> you cannot show a single successful enterprise that does not require land You're engaging in reductio ad absurdum, because the space every person occupies is required for them to exist. Your argument is simply silly. A land-based business would be one that farms or mines or puts a racetrack on the land. Two businesses can be contained in offices right next to each other, and one goes bust and the other gets rich. T…

You declared that land wasn’t a part of wealth creation, and then pointed toward Japan as an example of wealth creation with a low amount of land and a lot of wealth and South America as an example of a lot of land and no wealth creation. All of this to support your claim that land != wealth creation

It is not a reductio ab absurdum argument to ask you to give proof to a statement that you declared.

I have already been warned about engaging in flame war arguments, so I will not respond to your other points unless you can provide evidence for what I consider your very incendiary claims that the land taken from other peoples was not in involved in wealth creation.

At best, we simply do not agree on basic interpretations of reality if you are pro free markets and capitalism but also don’t think plundered land had anything to do with wealth creation

Re: An Economy of Overfed Middlemen

#143

Post by int_19h »

clairity wrote: post #90
int_19h wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thiel didn't claim to have invented this strategy. The reason why people associate him with monopolies is because he claimed that they're better for the consumers . And he wasn't the first to make that argument, either - it's straight from Bork's "The Antitrust Paradox" - Thiel just happened to be the most prominent "big tech" voice who openly embraced this notion.

he was one of the few because the idea that monopolies were good for consumers is about a 5th grader's level of thinking. in a perfect world where monopolies serve a single, narrow segment, don't overreach into adjacent markets or sociopolitics, and there's no general uncertainty or strife, you might argue they'd be a more efficient than multiple market participants, but we live in a dynamic and ever-changing world w…

I'm not suggesting that he was right; quite the opposite, I blame the man for the sorry state of affairs today. But this idea was not restricted to "a few" - Bork's book was popular in circles around Reagan, and from there it became a part of modern Republican economic orthodoxy. What was unusual was a businessman, and in the industry that had already seen issues with monopolies at that, saying it openly.

Re: An Economy of Overfed Middlemen

#144

Post by mariusor »

zwieback wrote: post #120
8note wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a sales mechanism for CSA boxes they aren't too bad The efficiency is dependent on what you're measuring - food per land area? Food per energy input? Energy output per energy input?

I was thinking of total energy (and maybe something like CO2) per food on the customer's table, including the waste that's produced.

For me personally it doesn't tract that reducing the supply chain between producer and consumer to the maximum will result in more energy expenditure:

The supplier has one trip to make to sell their current stock.

The consumer has one trip to make to buy multiple items that they're interested in (since this is a market).

Re: An Economy of Overfed Middlemen

#146

Post by jessaustin »

int_19h wrote: post #72
sylvain_kerkour wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The passivity against monopolies has more to do with international competition and the fear of losing world domination.

The passivity against monopolies in US is a well-documented consequence of a drastic reinterpretation of the historical justification for anti-trust legislation in 1980s, driven primarily by right-wing "free market" proponents (I'm putting that in quotes because any monopoly is the opposite of free market by its classic definition). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox Before then, things were very dif…

The entire four-decade scam called "The Federalist Society" has been a devil's bargain between the "rich people should be richer" monopolists you identify and pro-lifers. The rich lobbyists held their noses and tolerated the pro-lifers. The pro-lifers were on the whole too dumb to realize that Gilded-Age levels of wealth inequality are not good for poor dumb people or for unborn babies. Either of these groups by itself would not hold six seats on the Supreme Court. Ethical people should seek similar collaborations that could improve our society rather than devastating it.

Re: An Economy of Overfed Middlemen

#147

Post by mlsu »

WalterBright wrote: post #122
8note wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's such an easy attribution to capitalism. If anything, it's ignoring property rights when people become richer. If you consider the settler colonial projects like the USA, the wealth comes from ignoring the property ownership of the indigenous people, and then also the slavery, and the ignoring or intellectual property for inventions and arts. If you look at Europe, there's the extreme wealth tran…

What you posted is certainly the prevailing modern opinion. Looking a bit deeper, though: 1. if wealth comes from owning property, why weren't the indigenous people wealthy? 2. In South America, the indigenous people were pushed off their land, too. Why did South America remain poor up to the present? 3. How did Japan become such an incredible economic power despite having little land and no natural resources? 4. The…

The historical record soundly contradicts you wrt Japan. It modernized and became powerful on the backs of colonies in Manchuria and the Korean peninsula. Japan was a backwater prior to the Meiji Restoration, when those projects began.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_East_Asia_Co-Prosper...

Re: An Economy of Overfed Middlemen

#148

Post by maerF0x0 »

anamax wrote: post #136
maerF0x0 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Zuckerberg has more resources than me. Yes but there is are rules & caps for political contributions: https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate... I'm not arguing against 1st, I'm arguing that a business (not a person) has speech or a 1st right (which people absolutely do), and that the net result of acting like they do is really hurting the citizens of America.

The NYT is not subject to said "rules or caps" when it advocates for candidates. Neither is Zuckerberg. Why should people who get together to do political speech be treated any differently?

I think we agree in principle, but are disagreeing in the resultant law.

It sounds to me like you're advocating saying NYT, and rich people can give large sums of money, therefore why cant groups of people also do it?

I'm advocating for NYT and rich people should not be allowed to give large sums of money, and neither should individuals beyond their individual contribution cap.

The principle I am all for is that wealthy people and corporations should not be able to bring disproportionate resources to politics than their underlying democratic unit (a single unit vote in the case of a wealthy person, no votes in the case of a corporation). And therefore the caps for wealthy people should be the same as for middle/poor people, and caps for corporations should be 0 because they are not democratic political units.

I'm listening to https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-government-and-civ... to try and discern if maybe I have a completely broken idea of what citizens united is

Re: An Economy of Overfed Middlemen

#149

Post by WalterBright »

mlsu wrote: post #147
WalterBright wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you posted is certainly the prevailing modern opinion. Looking a bit deeper, though: 1. if wealth comes from owning property, why weren't the indigenous people wealthy? 2. In South America, the indigenous people were pushed off their land, too. Why did South America remain poor up to the present? 3. How did Japan become such an incredible economic power despite having little land and no natural resources? 4. The…

The historical record soundly contradicts you wrt Japan. It modernized and became powerful on the backs of colonies in Manchuria and the Korean peninsula. Japan was a backwater prior to the Meiji Restoration, when those projects began. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_East_Asia_Co-Prosper...

I'm talking about after WW2. Japan's industry and economy were literally burned to the ground. Yet by the 1980s, the US was terrified that Japan's economy was going to take over the world.

What they did after WW2 was adopt a free market.

Re: An Economy of Overfed Middlemen

#150

Post by count »

adamrezich wrote: post #89
count wrote: post #88

This feels like he's copying Stratechery, down to the stick figure MS Paint diagrams (e.g. https://stratechery.com/2018/the-bill-gates-line/ )

lots of blogs are like this though, using quick-and-dirty visually-accessible illustrations to convey ideas.

I mean, the concept and stuff too.
Post reply on HN