Marc Andreessen Annotates Paul Krugman's Amazon Op-Ed

Wow. Talk about an advertisement for the ineffectiveness of annotations. I've got comments from multiple different authors on here simultaneously - who are all these people? I was interested in Marc's annotations - talk about bait and switch.

For complex subjects, this is a great example of why single-author critiques are best, so you can follow a single person's train of thought and their logical conclusions (or errors).

This particular debate strikes me as pretty juvenile in both directions - by Krugman, and his critics. Marc gets "closest to the pin" for me when he says "if Amazon was a monopoly, it would be raising prices." Of course, that's not to say any big company can't overplay its leverage in "supplier negotiations" and this is surely something worth discussing. Marc is also right that the judgment here is a lot more nuanced than standard oil owning 60% of the market.

Going a little deeper on the Hachette dust-up, it's really interesting that the chattering classes never took much of an axe to Amazon's reputation until it tread on their turf - book publishing! All the waylaid mom-and-pop stores were just hicks who had it coming. Protecting the fat advances paid to big name authors - that is sacrosanct - part of the rewards that go with public life these days, and part of the corruption IMHO.

I will end with Glazer's beginning - "Krugman nearly always gets it right...but this is very wrong." I find that this Amazon critique is easier to contextualize if you shift that understanding - Krugman is frequently wrong about many things, and this Amazon article fits neatly with that overall trend.

This is an interesting observation. I wonder if it's because, on Paul Graham's disagreement hierarchy [1], inline annotations strongly encourage DH3 responses, make it challenging to write DH4-5 (because of lack of space, and interruption of the flow of the main piece), and outright make it impossible to write a DH6 response.

That doesn't necessarily make them bad - often you can provide useful elaboration or contradict factual assertions - but I think you're right that they do have a petty vibe to them.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

>Marc gets "closest to the pin" for me when he says "if Amazon was a monopoly, it would be raising prices."

That's not really what he says, he said that if they raised prices, Krugman would take that as evidence of monopoly behavior as well. Monopolies don't always raise prices; sometimes they keep them quite low.

That's pretty much how negotiation works.

If a company doesn't give me the raise I want, I accept an offer from a company that does give me the raise I want: "Taking my toys and going home"

If you say "Well, I don't agree with you, however, I'm going home and leaving my toys here for you to play with" then you'll probably end up at home without any toys.

Taking your toys and going home is your BATNA. Hachette has a shitty BATNA and is hence losing the negotiation, because they don't have any toys Amazon wants, and hence Amazon doesn't care they are going to go home and whine to daddy Krugman that little Jeffery isn't sharing his toys.

It's 2014, taking words from a text file from some author, putting them into a PDF isn't some kind of miracle that warrants 90% of the cost of the book.

Ah, this is great. I had forgotten about this essay. I think this part is particularly relevant:

> Even as high as DH5 we still sometimes see deliberate dishonesty, as when someone picks out minor points of an argument and refutes those. Sometimes the spirit in which this is done makes it more of a sophisticated form of ad hominem than actual refutation. For example, correcting someone's grammar, or harping on minor mistakes in names or numbers. Unless the opposing argument actually depends on such things, the only purpose of correcting them is to discredit one's opponent.

It's really easy to end up doing this when replying inline.