Corporations in the Age of Inequality

...ignoring all those who do not make that choice. Nice cherry-picking.

> Plenty of call center workers are allowed (or required) to work from home

Changing the subject again. We were talking specifically about people who were making Silicon Valley salaries, not call center workers. You need leverage to do that. The fact that you don't even know anyone with that kind of leverage tells me that you don't even know what you're talking about, and your constant employment of sleazy rhetorical tactics tells me that you're not even trying to learn.

> That isn't what "network effects" means.

OK, so it's not exactly network effects, but it's still synergy. Two good people together can often do things that neither could do alone. You got the point, so stop being obnoxious about terms.

> "Big" isn't an advantage here. It means bureaucracy and politics and Mythical Man Month problems.

Such a jaundiced view at such a young age. At least I assume you're young, based on not being senior enough to negotiate - or know anyone else who negotiates - better working conditions. Better than assuming you're old but barely competent. In any case yes, bigger companies can have their problems. So can smaller ones. They can each have their advantages. For example, at a startup there will inevitably be some specialized areas of knowledge where coverage is thin. That can be great for creating opportunities to learn, but not for solving an immediate problem in minimal time. At a larger company, especially a larger rich company which is what we're talking about, there might well be a world-class expert on staff for even the most obscure specialty. There might be specialized hardware (or teams to develop it), partner relationships, etc. Big companies can be mismanaged and small companies can be mismanaged. That's why nine out of ten startups fail. Counting only the hits for one side and only the misses for the other is not how rational people approach a problem, or how honest people discuss one.

> What do you suppose is stopping the same people from coming together on their own and just keeping the money their work generates?

There could be many reasons, from simple risk aversion to lack of skill (or interest) in the non-technical aspects of running a business to the need for leads and contacts. You do realize that most people don't work for startups, right? There's a whole world outside that bubble.

> How is Apple's billion dollars better than any random capitalist's billion dollars?

Wrong question. What matters is how Apple's budget for technical hires compares to others' budgets for hiring in those same specialties. That's where the competition occurs. The VC money, fragmented across many companies pulling in many directions and each having to carry their own business infrastructure, would have to be much more than a single focused company's investment in that area of overlap. One of the big five can spend a million dollars each for a dozen hires in a particular area. A startup would be hard pressed to justify that to their investors, precisely because those investors would rather have that money to make other bets entirely. It's a bit of a collective action problem, which I would have thought anyone spouting so much pseudo-economics would know about.

I think the article looks at it in a unique perspective that is missed. Between firm inequality is a result of technology, especially technology with natural monopoly characteristics (search, social network).

I don't think the article's recommendation of breaking up monopolies will reduce inequality at all. If you break Google or Facebook up, you'll get two companies with nearly isomorphic hiring and pay practices.

It's not as if wealth doesn't get redistributed for a variety of reasons (war, theft, taxes, communism, etc.). But the reality is, any economic system left to its own ends will inevitably result in a few gaining manipulating the system to gain the majority of the wealth while the rest fall farther behind. The discrepancy in the West hasn't been noticed because the economic "pie" so-to-speak has simply grown larger. When the pie stops growing, you'll start to see the effects of the inevitable trend start to appear.

> The answer is not to turn back the clock, it's to ride the economic wave and up-skill our labor pool because too many people in the west are being left behind in unskilled jobs, when actually there are plenty of skilled job vacancies available compared the the actual number of unemployed.

I agree, turning back the clock isn't the solution. However, I'm also aware that the situation isn't going to improve for the majority of people in the west. It's easy to say "up our game" but how much? Most people in the US now have bachelors. That was SUPPOSED to get you in the door to business. What happened? The bar went up. Now people are stuck with debt they can't get out of to loan sharks who won't forgive. Even if we erased all that, would that fix the problem? No, because the skill level required for entry is too high. Why? It's not merely because companies couldn't just hire from a number of talented candidates to do the job, it's because companies want to make money, and they're trying to do it by only investing in candidates they believe will bring them money (which means the experts), no investment in training. Every dime they spend towards training candidates is a dime their competitor gains when their newly-trained employees leave. Companies each sit on their own money source, and at the top of the economic chain are the billionaires with investments in all these companies and siphoning out penny after penny until - should time be on their side - they have it all. That won't happen in the long run for the aforementioned reasons (war, taxes, etc.), but you can't deny it would be fantastic to be in a personal financial situation where "money is no object".

Notably, a number of people can't actually meet the bar, esp. the handicapped and those who just don't have a knack for technical things. What are they supposed to do? Their jobs will eventually be replaced by robots, and should we get to that point, even those "middle class Chinese" will eventually start to see their wages reduced from 2 yen to nothing.

So yeah, there are plenty of jobs, but they won't be filled. People (esp. the rich) want people to make them money, not people who don't. Of course, perhaps I've overly simplified all this for the sake of brevity and haven't ironed out the argument to your satisfaction, but I trust you can find some unemployed people - skilled or not - and ask how their job search is going.