701–710 of 735 posts
[0]: http://www.econtalk.org/michael-munger-on-crony-capitalism/
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If you think the debate is purely about relative wealth, you are misunderstanding most of it. But even still: relative wealth distribution getting too extremely unequal has negative ramifications for any society, regardless of the absolute wealth. But again: that is NOT the issue in this case. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/22/697170790/anti... for more perspective, a bunch of discussion about antitrust i…
>>> relative wealth distribution getting too extremely unequal has negative ramifications for any society, regardless of the absolute wealth Like what exactly? I do not understand why people are upset over extreme wealth. I think Jeff Bezos deserves to be a billionaire and I would not want to live in a society that does not allow people like him succeed and accumulate this sort of money. The quetion is what happens w…
Now, Jeff Bezos is absolutely a remarkable and unique person who worked very hard and intelligently to get to where he is. But on just the pure matter of "deserve" it's so much more complex than the way you are looking at it. We don't live in a fair world. Look up "just world fallacy". In a world that is quite out of alignment from what we'd have if everyone got what they "deserve", it's simplistic to look at select cases like Bezos and judge from there.
But that's not what this is about AT ALL.
The concept of anti-trust and of managing this stuff is about power. The question is whether it's okay for Bezos and the whole company really to not only be wealthy but have monopoly-like power in the market. I have no reason to believe you checked out the link I posted earlier because you went on and repeated arguments about wealth — and this is NOT about that, not philosophically or legally. It's not even about taking away Bezos' wealth! Anti-trust is not about wealth redistribution, it's only about stopping anti-competitive threats to market competition.
> In a capitalistic society it deisappears within 2-3 generations
Well, that's just factually wrong. Capitalism doesn't just automatically do that, and the evidence doesn't support that claim either. And we don't have any sort of "pure" capitalism in existence to even study anyway. You need to get beyond these superficial specious ideas if you want to understand the reality. Start by treating your presumptions as hypotheses and figure out what evidence would be scientifically strong enough to validate or invalidate them and see how they hold up.
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> Firefox is nearly the last remaining holdout against Chromium. And the reason they don't have more market share is because Chrome is still faster and provides a better experience on average than Firefox does. I switched (back) to Firefox a few years ago, and I'm mostly happy with it. But when I try to get others to switch, those that end up not switching try for a few days and run into horrible performance issues t…
AFAICT, Firefox almost exclusively has performance issues on Google's websites . Which is a reinforcing point to the threat of Google's monopoly.
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> Splitting territorial monopolies into smaller territorial monopolies is unlikely to help. It seemed have helped in the Ma Bell[0] days[1]. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
Splitting a large monopoly into smaller territorial monopolies gets you all the drawbacks of a monopoly with none of the benefits of centralization. Pretty much a total loss. Improvement in US telecom probably had more to do with demonopolization wholesale at the national level rather than the formation of the baby bells.. which pretty much all failed.
The general premise is that the smaller companies allows competition to enter the market. It is precisely because of this competition that the smaller bells all failed - because they were still stuck in the mentality that they needn't compete, whilst also lacking the resources to drive the competition out of town (e.g.: lobbying, buy them out, etc.). They didn't control the whole chain, anymore.
That's supposed to be the idyllic of the capitalist system, yeah?
I'm genuinely not trying to be contrarian, here, but trying to understand how breaking up a monopoly, such as Bell, didn't have any direct consequences on the territorial monopolies.
For example, if Bell had an agreement with 'x' area that they were the sole provider in that area, then as soon as they were no longer Bell, that monopoly agreement essentially hit dissolution, yeah? In principle, that should have an almost immediate net-positive effect on the area, I would think?
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>>> relative wealth distribution getting too extremely unequal has negative ramifications for any society, regardless of the absolute wealth Like what exactly? I do not understand why people are upset over extreme wealth. I think Jeff Bezos deserves to be a billionaire and I would not want to live in a society that does not allow people like him succeed and accumulate this sort of money. The quetion is what happens w…
I don't have time to answer your specific claim about why relative wealth inequality is a problem even if the poor aren't miserably poor. It's a complex and deep subject. There's resources out there if you are curious. And yes, there's a good share of BAD arguments against wealth inequity (lots of people who are just resentful and superficial and believe even factually wrong things) — so you could spend your time con…
>>> Well, that's just factually wrong.
Really?
http://money.com/money/3925308/rich-families-lose-wealth/
https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/the-real-reason-bil...
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> What a real monopoly is is when there is no consumer choice at all, leading to large corporate profits that hurt consumers at the pricing level. Well, sure, 100% national market share is obviously a monopoly. But you're also a monopoly if you distort a market (generally markets with less than 3 major players) or have control or distortion over individual markets (you can have a monopoly in NYC but not the US, for e…
>I think this obviously applies to telecoms, which often have monopolies over certain areas (and often granted by local government! thanks a lot Philly city council). That's a key distinction. Are there any actual monopolies (I don't mean companies that are merely dominant) that are not backed by government?
Let's clear up what we're talking about. I don't find monopolies to be a very interesting subject.
What I have a problem with is anticompetitive behavior (which is illegal but the US has been notably slacking on enforcement for years). When a company uses their position as a platform for sales to start pushing into selling actual products in markets they've determined to be profitable, or a company bundles their applications with their mobile platform thereby dominating the app market, or when a company runs the largest platform for search but simultaneously distorts it through advertising and mysterious delisting or account shutdowns, then you have problems. These companies are anti-competitively distorting markets in ways that consumers can't understand and requires regulation.
There are two ways tech companies are often uncompetitive. Predatory or below cost-pricing, https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a... is first among them. Think Uber, where they lose money each ride. "Free" services also seem like they violate this, as they prevent anyone from competing in that market. You can't sell private email services so long as free email exists. App and service bundling falls under the other condition, https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a.... Mysterious delisting or shutting down accounts without reason or recourse falls under refusal to deal, https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a....
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Saying Google == email is a bit naive. Google is search, and the internet starts with search. They definitely have a monopoly on search and it's what's essentially powering almost all of Google revenue right now.
Their revenue comes from ads, which happen to be on their search, which is used because it is the best, not because people are forced to use it.
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I don't have time to answer your specific claim about why relative wealth inequality is a problem even if the poor aren't miserably poor. It's a complex and deep subject. There's resources out there if you are curious. And yes, there's a good share of BAD arguments against wealth inequity (lots of people who are just resentful and superficial and believe even factually wrong things) — so you could spend your time con…
> In a capitalistic society it disappears within 2-3 generations >>> Well, that's just factually wrong. Really? http://money.com/money/3925308/rich-families-lose-wealth/ https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/the-real-reason-bil...
> Indeed, 70% of wealthy families lose their wealth by the second generation, and a stunning 90% by the third, according to the Williams Group wealth consultancy.
What is that? Sounds like a marketing claim by a company catering services to the wealthy about how to keep their family wealth. I can't just accept it blindly.
I agree that in the (unusual) case of Gates, he's obviously not just hoarding and passing on his wealth directly, but the upbringing and advantages his kids are getting plus $10 million leaves them still really wealthy compared to nearly anyone else on the planet regardless of the fact that it's a miniscule fraction of Gates' current wealth.
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But Amazon just fullfils orders on most of the products while collecting data , where as brick and mortar stores resell the competitions products
Don’t brick and mortar stores collect inventory and trend data too? Amazon isn’t the first one to do this, they just put the data closer to the center of their business so it’s more public that they collect data.
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> If a company controls a certain % of marketshare, that behavior crosses into anti-competitive. That's just incorrect. There's nothing wrong with controlling 100% of the market share, as long as you don't use your position to illegally prevent competition. > Amazon's behavior is a textbook anti-competition. That completely counters the point you just made. Amazon accounts for maybe 5% of retail sales, and Walmart is…
> as long as you don't use your position to illegally prevent competition. Which is why I said, literally, "their behavior crosses into anti-competitive." You can compete with vendors, or you can control most of the market. But you can't do both: control the market, then use that advantage to drive competition out of business. > Even in the eCommerce market their share is around 50%. 50% is a staggeringly high market…
Yes, and I'm saying that it isn't true. Merely owning majority market share doesn't make a company anti-competitive. Anti-competitive behavior does. And while it takes the latter following the former to work, it certainly isn't guaranteed.
> You can compete with vendors, or you can control most of the market. But you can't do both: control the market, then use that advantage to drive competition out of business.
They absolutely can drive competition out of business as long as they aren't using their position to do so illegally. Gmail shut down a lot of email providers, not through anti-competitive behavior but through providing a more compelling product. Amazon has yet to successfully drive any supplier out of business. There's an argument that they broke Toys R Us, but that wasn't anti-competitive, that was through introducing toys that weren't severely overpriced. Walmart assisted with that.
> 50% is a staggeringly high market share. For reference, Toyota has less than 10% market share.
Toyota is in a nearly 100 year old industry which has multiple multi-national companies competing. iRobot has a 62% market share but nobody is looking to take down big vacuum.
50% market share of a sub-market within a major market is a weak argument. While they have 50% of online market share, they have something like 9% of actual retail sales, which is considerably less than Walmart.
> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-20/got-a-hot....
> http://fortune.com/2016/04/20/amazon-copies-merchants/
Your argument was that Amazon ranks them higher in search results. Both of these articles are discussing Amazon using white-label suppliers to build competing products. That's not the same thing. Every major retailer has been building white-label and private-label products for decades.
> Those companies are accusing amazon of literally copying their unique products.
You'll notice what they aren't doing is suing Amazon for patent-infringement. The very article you posted shows that while Amazon makes competing products, they don't violate patents.
> Amazon is literally copying existing products that do well.
No they are making competing products. That's not copying, that's called "competition".
> their product cuts straight to the top ranked in your categories.
That should have been a very clear indicator for you, but you kind of missed the point. Amazon doesn't rank their products higher. The ranking algorithm is generic, and largely tied to top selling items in a category. When you see two products that are very similar, and one is half the cost of the other, you buy the cheaper market.
It seems, to me at least, your issue isn't Amazon. Your issue is the consumer market doing exactly what it's always done.