[HN Gopher] Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough ...
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Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us
Author : passwordoops
Score : 334 points
Date : 2024-06-09 11:57 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thebignewsletter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thebignewsletter.com)
| baggy_trough wrote:
| The provided examples don't hold a candle to the termite-gnawing
| power of the armies of government bureaucrats and lawyers that
| are the real source of the cost explosion.
| passwordoops wrote:
| I hear this a lot whenever antitrust is brought up. Do you have
| concrete examples of how, say, the DMV or Kansas Board of
| Consumer Welfare costs society more that, say, UnitedHealth's
| price gouging, Microsoft's SaaS, or Google and Apple's backdoor
| deals with Apple or Amazon's practices?
| willcipriano wrote:
| War is probably the largest line item for most people. Losing
| decades long wars is expensive. You have the social decay
| that comes with focusing abroad rather than at home.
| Homelessness, drug addiction (my friends probably were killed
| by heroin made from poppies that a marine was tasked with
| protecting, maybe some of yours too)
|
| Running a close second (maybe first) is regulatory capture,
| things like patents and certificates of need. Requirements
| for patented safety features in cars, patents on medicine,
| copyright on characters your grandma grew up with.
| VincentEvans wrote:
| Haha, DMV... I just moved to North Carolina, and the next
| available appointment at the DMV to change the address on my
| driver license is in September (it's beginning of June as I
| am writing this).
|
| When I moved the last time in a different state - the
| appointment to change my address on my driver license was
| same week and took about 15 mins, most of which I spent
| trying to get a decent picture.
|
| So I "know" it doesn't take very long to print a plastic
| card.
| passwordoops wrote:
| Ever try to reach Google customer support?
| Closi wrote:
| Doesnt that likely demonstrate insufficient
| resource/capacity rather than OPs point that there are too
| many bureaucrats?
| michaelt wrote:
| In my country, you wouldn't need an in person
| 'appointment' to merely change an address on a driving
| license.
|
| Seems rather inefficient to have offices all over the
| state, appointments, inefficiencies like missed
| appointments, and the waste of citizens' time, for a
| process that can be done by mail.
| yuliyp wrote:
| Moving states requires validating the information from
| the previous state too. It's not a matter of the new
| state just updating an entry in its database. It's an
| entirely new entry. Given that, in person validation
| makes sense.
|
| Moving within a state is simpler, and indeed can be done
| online in most states.
|
| Granted in many countries there's a national ID system.
| Also a part of the point of government-issued IDs is that
| there's more validation around its issuance, and many
| other parts of society take advantage of that.
| teitoklien wrote:
| Maybe there are too many bureaucrats that all the
| expenses are bloated and funding payroll of unproductive
| gov workers.
|
| Personally ive found that to be more true in most
| countries.
|
| Civil service/Gov workers get tons of new unnecessary
| roles with bloated titles for departments that barely do
| anything, just to maintain a cycle of promotion, to keep
| the gov workforce "motivated".
|
| Not that i disagree that United Health is price gouging
| that there are way too many corrupt unnatural
| monopolistic companies preventing america from growing
| fast and allowing innovation to take place.
|
| I think both things are true at the same time.
|
| Talk to any gov department and they'll often tell you,
| the budgeting is structured in a horrible way that it
| encourages them to do wasteful spending, they must keep
| spending entirety of their "budget" to retain a similar
| sized budget next year, "use it or lose it", to avoid
| going through hassle of convincing politicians to re-
| boost budget later, departments resort to wasting money
| with meaningless expenses just to retain their budgets...
|
| Extrapolate that to a gov that spends more than a
| trillion dollars annually at times and this is a
| disastrous level of wasteful spending.
| jrmg wrote:
| You can just go to the NC DMV in the afternoon. Afternoons
| are not appointment based. I updated my license two days
| after moving here. I had to wait an hour or so.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This isn't really the DMV's doing on its own. Same thing
| happened when I moved to Texas (or at least when I first
| needed to get a driver's license). In both cases, the root
| cause is GOP control of a purplish state trending blue
| shutting down offices and restricting ID services on
| purpose to suppress voting turnout.
| sneak wrote:
| How about the wars the US is fighting directly in 13
| different sovereign countries presently? That's gotta be
| slightly costly.
| tekla wrote:
| Damn I must have missed this news. What countries is the US
| at war with?
| sneak wrote:
| None of it is declared war; it's all just "special
| military operation" kinda stuff. It's actually crazy how
| many different places the US has boots on the ground.
|
| More details in the ET podcast episode, in public rn and
| can't find/transcribe.
| https://open.spotify.com/episode/2Fcid5hjKbdgLWmvHreOpV
| luckylion wrote:
| Some DMV would be a part of the government, it wouldn't be
| _the_ government. To not build up a straw man, you'd have to
| compare it to, say, Apple's battery quality control
| department or Amazon's warehouse maintenance team.
| passwordoops wrote:
| Also, I forgot to ask specifically which army of government
| bureaucrats and lawyers? The ones who try to go after the
| private entities who profit from harming health and environment
| but outsource costs too greater society?
| flightster wrote:
| You forgot vets and dentists!
| bearjaws wrote:
| Let's not even start on healthcare and PE...
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| And Chiropractors!
| dventimi wrote:
| And attorneys!
| spicyusername wrote:
| I very much agree with the premise that economists unduly focus
| on a few metrics of dubious quality - labor force participation,
| personal consumption expenditures, market capitalization, wage
| growth, etc - and overfit them to construct a coherent narrative
| about the "strength" of the economy and what the experience of
| living in that economy must be like.
|
| There's a story right now being peddled by all the talking heads
| that the economy is "great", but consumers keep reporting feeling
| terrible, so consumers must not understand something.
|
| I think this goes the other way around. Our method for
| understanding the economy is flawed and is not properly capturing
| what all consumers know intuitively, things kind of suck, even
| when you have a job and even when you're still buying things.
|
| We need to start thinking about what information needs to be
| captured and how it needs to be reported to start making better
| sense of what's broken and how to fix it.
| jprete wrote:
| They're addicted to metrics instead of observation. Anything
| that isn't easily measured is considered to not exist,
| including how people feel about it.
|
| Now that I think about it, that's literal selection pressure
| for psychopathy.
| silverquiet wrote:
| I agree with much of this and I'll add one of my biggest
| stressors - opaque pricing. One of the biggest "innovations" in
| the US in the last decade or so seems to be to add as many
| hidden fees as possible to every service imaginable. Obviously
| it's hardly a new idea; I'm sure that human nature being what
| it is, they had to deal with it in Mesopotamia. But it makes
| budgeting very difficult; I suppose it's like living in a
| corrupt country; you just have to add an overhead for bribes as
| part of day-to-day living. Perhaps it isn't "like" living in a
| corrupt country; perhaps it just is living in a corrupt
| country.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> I'll add one of my biggest stressors - opaque pricing.
|
| Economic "models" make assumptions like markets being
| efficient. Meanwhile in the business classes next door they
| teach how to avoid competition because it's a race to the
| bottom. They all learn the prisoners dilemma as an example
| because it's how you need to think to avoid overt collusion.
|
| I'd like an economic model as powerful as the laws of
| thermodynamics, where everything is included if not
| explicitly. But I haven't seen one.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Economic "models" make assumptions like markets being
| efficient_
|
| No? You're thinking of a specific class of models.
| Generally speaking, prescriptive economics is about
| characterising what an efficient market _would_ look like
| and then identifying why reality is not that. (And whether
| that deviance is good or bad.)
|
| This article could be seen doing that. It seems like
| domains should be closed to $2, given an efficient market.
| But they're nine going on twelve.
| pydry wrote:
| Most of the assumptions made in economic models conceal
| sources of profit.
|
| They dont appear to be there to simplify complexity
| because they simulate situations that have never and will
| never be approximated (never been perfect competition or
| information, never will be).
|
| It's unlike, say, physics in this respect.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Most of the assumptions made in economic models
| conceal sources of profit_
|
| This is wildly inaccurate. A _huge_ amount of economics
| is focussed on profit. For obvious reasons.
|
| > _never been perfect competition or information, never
| will be_
|
| Frictionless surfaces are mostly a fiction, too. That
| doesn't mean calculating the expected outcome in a
| frictionless condition is useless. If the deviance is
| more than you'd expect from friction, that's informative.
|
| Unlike physics, a lot of people think their undergrad 101
| course plus skimming the _Economist_ an economist
| themselves makes. It's a common hubris, albeit one
| unusually common in tech. (Disclaimer: I'm not an
| economist. But I know the boundaries of my circle of
| competence in this.)
| specialist wrote:
| Yup.
|
| > _Economic "models" make assumptions like markets being
| efficient._
|
| Open markets require rules and referees.
|
| Freedom Markets(tm) advocates eliminate rules and refs.
| Because "regulations discourages free enterprise".
|
| The final result are closed markets.
|
| "free market" is doublespeak for winner-takes-all, anti-
| competition, pro-monopolies, plantation class, and
| neoliberalism.
| chaorace wrote:
| > Economic "models" make assumptions like markets being
| efficient. Meanwhile in the business classes next door they
| teach how to avoid competition because it's a race to the
| bottom
|
| You've more-or-less verbatim described the impetus behind
| the modern development of behavioral economics. That older
| sort of classical theory which you describe -- the one
| which frames the world in terms of "rational economic
| agents" -- has been out of vogue for nearly two decades
| now. Sure, you can still find the idea _taught_ in
| classes... but professors now treat the classical ideas
| more like a simplified foundation rather than gospel --
| much like a physics professor teaches Newtonian Physics
| before moving on to Relativity.
|
| > I'd like an economic model as powerful as the laws of
| thermodynamics, where everything is included if not
| explicitly. But I haven't seen one.
|
| ... and this is where you diverge in thinking from the new-
| school behavioral economists. According to the new-school,
| economics is a social science, a thing of statistical
| measurements and probabilities. Most modern economists
| would probably be inclined to chide you and say that
| attempting to characterize economics in terms of hard laws
| would be the same as disregarding the human element -- a
| reversion to the classical idea of "rational economic
| agents".
| TSP00N3 wrote:
| Good read (or in my case listen on Audible) on behavioral
| economics: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misbehaving:_T
| he_Making_of_B...
| ghaff wrote:
| Somewhat. Some of the science behind behavioral economics
| relates to the fact that there are actually rationales
| behind certain preferences that aren't strictly about
| expected value. The utility of money is not a linear
| function. Etc.
|
| People also don't understand statistics well as a whole,
| to be sure. But behavioral economics is also not purely
| about people being irrational.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Yeah, "the free market" tends to have cheerleaders with
| contradictory premises for how it will work. For example:
|
| 1. "With perfect price/deal information, this math shows
| economic actors will be super duper efficient."
|
| 2. "Since people have the freedom to make secret deals for
| hidden prices, this prevents cartels by allowing
| defection."
|
| Unfortunately it feels like rather than addressing the
| contradiction, they prefer to quietly march under the same
| banner and in the end we get _neither_ benefit.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| This seems to be rooted in a generalized problem which I'll
| hastily call the conscious abuse of polite understanding, or
| abuse of economic consensus. Another possible rubric for
| this, a bit more sensationalized, would be "destructive
| precision".
|
| A simple example would be the hollowing-out of conventional
| terms everyone believes they hold the same settled definition
| of, such as "a flight." Instead of transacting according to
| what consensus suggests "a flight" meant a decade or two ago,
| when most would have expected this term to have thoroughly
| matured to the point of semantic stability, instead
| delivering against the most contextually minimized, stripped
| down interpretation of the term possible that still qualifies
| as valid, and attaching fees to all of the other attendant
| associations of value that used to be included in the scope
| of general consensus of the term.
| SI_Rob wrote:
| So, a pricing exploit based on arbitrage between the
| rigorous description (and enforcement) of payment for a
| service in one direction, and the comparatively un-policed
| description of the service delivered, in the other? Perhaps
| the lawyering class wants everyone to either suffer under
| their miserable penchant for overweening semantic
| nitpicking, or suffer it along with them.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| A description versus price equation, where there's a lot
| of variables on one side and only one on the other, does
| seem to be the model.
|
| I guess I would add that it may only be a Salient as it
| is with respect to certain things like flights, because
| there are a couple of outstanding counter examples like
| cell phones and and automobiles which seem to exhibit the
| exact opposite trend.
|
| A deeper analysis might reveal that there is a cycle at
| at work here, wherein the initial novelty of a prodict or
| service which is destined to become a commodity, means
| there is not yet a strong set of expectations about what
| the service or product is "supposed" to provide.
| distinction in the market has to come from adding context
| to that essentially commodity utility.
|
| But later on some consumers begin to recognize that some
| of the additional context may not be strictly necessary
| or offer a value to them and would prefer
| compartmentalization of the core product as distinct from
| its value-added variants.
|
| When flights were a comparative novelty, or at least a
| novelty in different market segments at different times,
| distinction between products was through different levels
| and configurations of service or features rather than
| price.
|
| This may still be the phase of the product cycle that
| cell phones (setting aside the fairly stable tiers of
| product within that category) are in. It's harder to make
| as direct across the comparison with cars as they are
| older than both air travel and mobile phones, and because
| of all the regulation that enforces standardization of
| non-optional features related to safety.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| On the other hand, I recall paying roughly $100 per hour of
| one way flight time in the 2000s, and I still pay near
| $100, maybe $150 to $200 in peak season (including seat
| assignment and carry on luggage).
| ghaff wrote:
| I don't love taking flights in general--and my goal
| moving forward is to reduce the number of flights
| relative to the amount of travel overall. But I'm also
| well aware I could make my travel more comfortable but at
| an hourly cost that I'd probably much rather spend on
| other travel things. (Not that I cheap out beyond some
| floor.)
| euroderf wrote:
| The EU fixed it for airline tickets. It's not rocket surgery.
| chasebank wrote:
| Recently, I've seen this bleed into our local housing rental
| market. They'll advertise some amount for the house, then
| will say the attached garage is extra per month, and moving
| most if not all utilities to tenant responsibility.
| raizer88 wrote:
| "The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data
| disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something
| wrong with the way you are measuring it," - Jeff Bezos
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| That's a pretty weird take to me. Crime stats and polling of
| people's perception of crime show this as clearly the wrong
| approach for instance.
|
| Most studies show that no matter what direction crime is
| going in, a substantial majority of people think their
| neighborhoods are safer and that everywhere else is basically
| a war zone that is getting worse. There's a total disconnect
| locally/nationally in perception that is _also_ detached from
| crime stats.
|
| All of this is to say that the anecdotes are basically all
| but worthless in the case of understanding how bad crime is
| on any appreciable scale beyond a few blocks of one's
| neighborhood.
|
| * https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/11/16/voters-
| pe...
|
| * https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-americans-are-
| conv...
|
| * https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23663437/crime-
| violence-m...
|
| * https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/as-concerns-grow-
| aroun...
| fjdidianabak wrote:
| I dunno, it seems in line with most stereotypes being more
| true than false [1]. "Common sense" is often derided in
| online spaces like this, but when there hasn't been a
| massive media / social effort to convince the population
| otherwise [2], it's pretty reliable.
|
| Taking a quick glance at the articles you linked shows the
| same behavior as those reporting on the economy - defining
| disingenuous targets so they can claim their headline is
| true. To tie this back to anecdotes, I think it comes down
| to trust. When my neighbor says they're afraid to lose
| their job due to housing, food, childcare being a lot more
| expensive I dont see any motivated reasoning behind that
| statement. On the other end, economists (and all the
| articles you linked) have many incentives to distort the
| truth. On average anecdotes are going to come from a more
| truthful place - both because you trust the source and know
| their biases.
|
| [1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-
| therapy/2018...
|
| [2] https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/41556-americ
| ans-m...
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I definitely understand where you are coming from and
| would never deny these things are happening. But my point
| is that argues for too much trust in anecdotes and
| people's perceptions.
|
| We all know memory is incredibly faulty, for instance.
| Yet people have a very high perception of their own
| memory's accuracy. It's kind of in the same vein. It's
| not that people can't remember things accurately, it's
| that we need to start from a place of skepticism when
| depending on it. Same thing goes for people's perceptions
| of crime, the economy, etc. Their anecdotes and lived
| experience, insofar as they can even accurately explain
| their lived experience, needs to be put into context re:
| its value for determining "reality."
|
| That being said I would never undermine the value of how
| people feel. If people don't feel safe, that is a bad
| thing too. And we can cite all the stats in the world we
| want but ultimately feeling unsafe is not a good thing
| and that perception needs to be addressed.
| llm_trw wrote:
| >Crime stats and polling of people's perception of crime
| show this as clearly the wrong approach for instance.
|
| The only crime stat you can trust is murder and that's
| because bodies can't be hidden (easily).
|
| Everything else gets swept under the rug.
|
| When I wanted to report my car broken into I was hung up on
| three times because of a poor quality line, which was fine
| before I told them what I was calling for. When I went
| there in person I had to wait 40 minutes for someone to
| take my report and give me a reference number for my
| insurance.
|
| Crime is absolutely massively under reported.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 100% correct. They even teach this in graduate
| criminology programs. Stats are only consistently
| reliable for a narrow range of events.
| enavari wrote:
| One need only download a community based self reporting
| app like "citizen" to see how much crime really exist..
| It's more than you'd like know. Like the previous poster
| said, not everything is reported.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I'm sure apps like this are targeted towards an already
| paranoid and crime-obsessed demographic, and they're
| going to be full of false positives. Not sure you can
| take that sample as representative.
| varjag wrote:
| But this hasn't changed over decades. Policing never was
| 100% effective and crime was always underreported. Yet if
| you ask people it's crime getting worse YoY.
| llm_trw wrote:
| It's getting worse.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Policing was effective enough that I never had to find
| someone to unlock a case for me at the store unless I was
| purchasing something particularly valuable. It was
| effective enough that you didn't see videos of people
| looting stores or driving around breaking into cars with
| impunity.
| varjag wrote:
| I don't know, these things were cliche plot devices in
| 1970s-1980s films and it appears everyone was convinced
| America headed into Escape From New York future.
| Naturally, few people had cine/video cameras on them at
| any time.
| shakow wrote:
| But as long as the stats are not reliable, that's unknown
| territory. Maybe the police is getting more lazier, maybe
| less, maybe there are less people reporting because it is
| seen as useless, maybe there are more because they get
| tired of it, one can simply not get a picture
| independently of where the trend is going.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| And yet, if more people you know report being victims of
| crime, and the official statistics point to a decrease,
| the people upthread are happy to declare a decrease.
| izacus wrote:
| You're making the exact same mistake as the poster you're
| answering to warns about - you're mixing the objective
| reality ("absolute crime numbers") to percieved reality of
| population.
|
| If the population percieves themselves unsafe and unhappy,
| your numbers don't really mean much to them because to
| restore happy society you need to look at *perception* and
| fix the reasoning behind it. Making the crime stats number
| go down won't do that by itself.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| In a different response I actually remarked on how I
| would never talk down to people who feel unsafe because
| we can cite all the stats we want in the world, but their
| feeling secure is very important as well.
| estebank wrote:
| > you need to look at _perception_ and fix the reasoning
| behind it.
|
| Many times that perception is shaped by the media we
| consume, which has no obligation to have any connection
| to the reality on the ground. At that point whatever is
| done to improve the reality doesn't have to have any
| impact on people's perception.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I don't really watch any broadcast/cable news these days.
| Was at a restaurant that had it going on their TV and my
| goodness all it was saying is "FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR".
| Absolute mind rotting garbage.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I was at an airport the other day and I was struck by how
| I saw four different new stations all covering one
| tornado in a town half way across the country from me.
| This was top line national news for like 20min with
| reporters standing by downed trees and going on and on
| about the "utter devastation." It seemed pretty small
| potatoes tbh but maybe I was missing context?
|
| You would think there is some sort of tornado epidemic
| nationwide based on the way they were acting. Tornadoes
| happen all of the time, and they are very tragic for
| those involved, but y'all aren't hearing about every
| house that burns down in my city lol
| izacus wrote:
| Which means that the fix is to change the media not the
| metrics. That's the gist of the argument - if your
| improvements of "reality" aren't making people happier,
| you're changing the wrong metric. In this case you need
| to change the media, not crime stats.
| estebank wrote:
| Changing the underlying reality without improving the
| perception leads to a political disconnect. Improving the
| perception without improving the underlying reality just
| makes people happier, but not better off. You have to do
| both if your objective is to improve people's lifes.
| dasil003 wrote:
| It's just a refutation of naive bias towards statistics,
| which is rampant in big organizations (see the McNamara
| fallacy). This is codified in the idea of being "data
| driven", which is the right thing if your data is a true
| proxy for the thing you care about; in practice it often
| isn't and you have to incorporate some more flimsy or
| subjective signal to better understand a problem.
| GOD_Over_Djinn wrote:
| Bingo. The obsession with quantification is a crutch that
| allows uncreative people to delegate their decision
| making to a mechanical analysis of raw data, rather than
| a first-principles understanding of their problem space.
| flakeoil wrote:
| It's probably related to how much or little we read about
| crime more than any true crime level. If we see 10 news
| articles everyday about crime, then we think there are a
| lot of crime around. If we read zero articles about crime,
| then it barely exists in our perception. What happens in
| reality does not affect our perception as much, as we
| probably seldomly see it for ourselves and when we see it,
| it would be difficult to objectively and statistically
| judge the crime level's direction with such few data points
| and biased experiences.
|
| It's similar to Hans Rosling's comments about poverty in
| the 3rd world. It often sounds like poverty is increasing
| as time goes by, but if looking at statistics, overall
| poverty is decreasing and have been doing so for decades.
| uoaei wrote:
| Exactly, in the case of crime there are so many more
| _vicarious_ anecdotes. If people were only allowed to
| discuss crimes that they were personally victim to, we
| would not be under the impression that crime is worse
| than ever.
| fallingknife wrote:
| When I have to spend 10 minutes finding a store employee
| to unlock a case for me to buy underwear and socks at
| Target when I didn't have to five years ago, I conclude
| that crime has gotten worse.
|
| When I see videos on the internet all the time of
| criminals just walking into stores and grabbing whatever
| they want while the security guard looks on and does
| nothing because the police will side with the criminal if
| he touches them, it is perfectly valid to assume that
| crime is worse.
|
| When the police do nothing to enforce the law I do not
| trust the statistics because they are based on reports to
| the police.
|
| Maybe the statistics are right, over the whole city, but
| where I live, crime has gotten worse.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > When I see videos on the internet all the time of
| criminals just walking into stores and grabbing whatever
| they want while the security guard looks on and does
| nothing because the police will side with the criminal if
| he touches them, it is perfectly valid to assume that
| crime is worse.
|
| How many videos have you seen on the Internet of stores
| just calmly going about business with no shoplifting
| going on? The number of videos on the Internet is not an
| indication of any overall trend. The stuff you're seeing
| makes it onto YouTube _because_ they are outliers.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Why have I only started seeing these outliers in the last
| few years? Also, the worst part of the videos isn't that
| they happen, but that they are allowed to happen. If the
| criminals weren't calmly going about their business
| without even wearing a mask and instead running from the
| security guard it wouldn't be so frustrating. If the news
| stories had a mugshot of the police arresting them
| quickly since their face is all over the internet it
| wouldn't be so infuriating. If the police didn't allow
| the criminals to run open air fencing operations right
| outside BART stations, I wouldn't be this mad.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Could there be other reasons why these videos are being
| uploaded more, and why you are being served them more
| over the last few years? Access to videography has been
| growing constantly since smartphones were introduced.
| There are now multiple platforms for uploading these
| videos, and doing so is easier than ever. These platforms
| algorithmically optimize for engagement and do this by
| promoting ragebait and controversy. And there are now
| entire, active communities dedicated to
| sharing/spreading/promoting these (r/PublicFreakout has
| almost 5M members). What you happen to be seeing may not
| reflect any sort of trend, either up or down.
| GOD_Over_Djinn wrote:
| I don't see this stuff on YouTube, I see it in the real
| world in the course of my everyday life.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Where do you live? It sounds quite bad. Has SF got that
| bad? I haven't been there since I worked there in 2015,
| but I read the authorites gave up on some crime?
|
| I noticed neither any crime or homeless at that time. But
| people now seem swear it has gotten to be a big problem.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| I was last there a couple years ago when the "SF is a
| lawless wasteland" nonsense was gaining a lot of
| traction. I saw some needles, some foil, a broken window
| or two, but otherwise it was a very calm and inviting
| city. Any city due to greater density will have more
| observable crime, but people are crapping their pants
| over exaggerations.
| epolanski wrote:
| I don't buy this completely.
|
| The measure of the perceived crime level in one's
| neighborhood isn't really dictated by stats or news, but
| your own and your neighbours lifes.
|
| I know where I live is quite calm bar some occasional
| burglar, and I know it because I live in the place and
| talk to people everyday.
| fallingknife wrote:
| This is actually a perfect example of Bezos being right on
| the money. You are measuring it wrong. The first and last
| articles focus only on violent crime, which is not what
| most people who are complaining about crime mean here. 538
| is a little better, but their charts only go through 2019
| before it became a major issue again. Only Vox seems to get
| it closer to correct (though still hung up on the violence
| thing):
|
| > One theory that came up again and again is that city
| residents and visitors are, to some extent, conflating
| actual violent crime with broader indications of urban
| disorder.
|
| If you are a leader like Bezos or a city politician you
| need to meet your customers / constituents where they are
| and fix the problems they want fixed whether or not it they
| are saying precisely what they mean. The anecdotes are
| right and the statistics are wrong.
| creer wrote:
| That's fair that perception is often wrong - but that's a
| different issue.
|
| Perception is also in large part the very thing that
| matters when it comes to crime. That is, do I get to live
| in peace or in constant worry? Do I get my property priced
| "fairly" when I sell or dramatically underpriced because of
| this perception that the area is unsafe? To summarize, in
| what you describe "crime stats" are ignoring half or two
| thirds of the problem.
|
| In San Francisco, "crime stats" are further muddied because
| of massive underreporting and cherry picking the
| definition. So called quality of life crime might be
| considered irrelevant because it rarely causes massive loss
| of property or injury. But it does make life extremely
| stressful for the locals (depending on the neighborhoods
| where it might be "tolerated" i.e. left rampant, or might
| not be tolerated.) In this case, "crime stats" deliberately
| not measuring anything very relevant.
|
| See also recent discussion of the squatting issue in Spain.
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| Those at the top of the chain, who benefit from the "strong"
| economy, have an intrinsic motivation to suggest that things
| are going just great. Many in Washington are either suckling
| the teats of the wealthy through campaign finance / lobbying,
| or hyper-rich from investments (and other forms of economic
| parasitism)--providing a great deal of motivation for decision
| makers in US government to not give a shit.
| ponector wrote:
| The answer is simple. Some consumers are feeling terrible and
| they are vocal about it. People mostly are ok and not talking
| about it.
| citizen_friend wrote:
| Alternative theory: the metrics don't describe our full
| economic experience.
| uoaei wrote:
| That's literally the point of the article.
| citizen_friend wrote:
| Yes.
| harimau777 wrote:
| Even if that's the case, that's a problem. First, it's bad
| for society to write people off. Are people going to be
| willing to contribute if they aren't sure whether they might
| be the next write off? Second, a small number of
| disenfranchised people can still cause a lot of problems if
| they get despirate.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean, this is true. And these days these people don't
| even need to be real. Kick off a few hundred thousand bots
| along with a visible ad campaign corresponding with how bad
| things are and you can get the people in the "not great,
| not terrible" camp thinking the end of the world is here.
| nothercastle wrote:
| The metrics are likely comparing 2020 item and 2024 item and
| assuming it's the same thing but the manufacturer cleverly
| gutted the 2024 item of all quality parts and just kept the
| name
| wholinator2 wrote:
| While also cleverly raising the price 50-200% during covid
| and then cleverly never lowering it back to normal once the
| supply chains started working
| owlstuffing wrote:
| Not that economics is a credible science, but you're conflating
| talking heads with economists. Talking heads exist to peddle
| the agenda of the elites who own them.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| who do you think economists also listen to?
| braiamp wrote:
| I hope they listen to data. Either that they gather
| themselves or gathered by reputable organizations. Consumer
| confidence index for example tries to gather the sentiment
| of the consumers.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Welath inequality means many companies just dont need the
| majority of consumers. Big pharma typifies his by increasing
| prices till they can just get a few whales to buy.
|
| The rental market and the.dojs anti trust is the same:
| landlorsa making money by limiting units to just the more
| wealth renters and leaving units empty.
|
| This is just qhat.happens wgen regulatots simply stop enforcing
| a minimum level of social goods.
| sodality2 wrote:
| This is related to a phenomenon that writer Kyla Scanlon has
| called the "vibecession" - a disconnect between the economy's
| metrics deemed to indicate its health, and the general
| populace's perception of it
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibecession
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| that is not a thing and that page will probably be gone soon.
|
| that is at most an attempt to control the narrative, and
| throw the growing inequality under the rug as some sort of
| mass hysteria. lame.
| sodality2 wrote:
| It is literally explicitly addressing the situation where
| these indicators claim everything's okay even though no one
| feels like it is - the idea that just because economic
| health metrics are up, doesn't mean anything for the
| average American.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| Two fine examples of this myopia are the basket of items that
| economists and government statisticians use to calculate
| inflation rates, and the nature of the jobs that are considered
| to measure labor force participation. Or perhaps more strictly,
| the metrics that those groups put out that the media choose to
| report on. CPI isnt always the best metric and something like
| healthcare costs are better tracked in the PCE metric. So you
| get this situation where CPI says "not bad, boys" and the
| consumers have a wildly different point of view.
|
| For labor participation, full employment is not great if
| everyone is working crappy jobs. I dont know if there are
| better metrics buried in the government's output, but it
| perhaps would be more in keeping with lived experience to track
| participation with dependence on supplemental sources of
| income. if you need a second job, or charity/government help,
| just to survive, then you dont have a "living job". That sort
| of thing isnt captured by LFP stats.
|
| To be clear, I do trust the govt stats in places like the UK
| and US. I just think they are measuring the wrong things.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Could someone explain why the parent comment is down voted?
|
| I don't notice anything off about it.
| AbstractH24 wrote:
| Why do you exclude the possibility that talking heads in news
| and politics are pedaling the idea that consumers feel it's
| terrible?
|
| Most everyone I know seems to be living it pretty good with
| much less concern for the future. Certainly compared to 2023
| and even compared to 2019.
| izacus wrote:
| What's the statistical relevancy of your "everyone I know"
| sample for US population in general?
|
| Are people you know of different ages, social classes, races,
| upbringings and living locations to capture the sentiment of
| population?
|
| Or are they all well off people in a few rich areas?
| AbstractH24 wrote:
| They are concentrated in a major metro area that was among
| the worst affected by the pandemic in America. They span
| many ages, social classes, races, upbringings, and jobs,
| from tech to blue-collar union work.
|
| Be that as it may, my point is that the possibility exists
| and is almost equally as likely. Not that it is correct.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| That's very good for you, you should count yourself lucky.
| But i think we should trust people when they tell us how they
| feel. Do you live paycheck to paycheck? Are you aware that a
| majority oh Americans (55-69%) do, defined as struggling to
| save or invest anything past the monthly expenses?
|
| I'm a late 20s man who made it into tech, I'm doing great! My
| friend who got into tech might kind of hate their corporate
| job lives but they're monetarily at least able to pay their
| student loans after 5 years of working. A few kids were able
| to start construction/lawn businesses, i don't know the
| details but they appear to be doing well. Every single other
| person that i know, who's finances I'm aware of directly, or
| indirectly (social media posts, etc. ) is having a hard time
| right now. I can count on one hand the number of people who
| feel good about the current US economy that i know, i speak
| and have spoken to dozens of people about this.
|
| Literally only the comp sci graduates are having a good time
| right now, and even that's starting to tighten. Jobs are
| getting more scarce, people have to take pay cuts to be able
| to actually have a life again, etc. You could say I'm doing
| well right now and then i could say that must mean everyone
| is doing well and the whole thing is propaganda. But there's
| a lot more than just successful people out here, we're on HN
| anyways, that says a lot about our socioeconomic status and
| friend groups.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Some factors on _my_ list of sentiment drags:
|
| * Manufacturers reducing product quality without buyers'
| knowledge. E.g., Pyrex or some SSD makers.
|
| * Shrinkflation: grocery stores selling slightly smaller-sized
| packages without buyers' knowledge. E.g., containers that used
| to be square, staying equally wide (for shelf space facing) but
| less deep.
|
| * Widespread Terms and Conditions / EULAs that undermine
| previously reliable consumer protections.
|
| * The sense that privacy-preserving products are now out of my
| financial reach, due to surveillance capitalism.
|
| I guess the main pattern in these things is a sense of failed
| consumer protections.
|
| EDIT: I'm ranting about _consumer_ sentiment, which is probably
| different from _economic_ sentiment. Apologies for going off
| topic.
| nothercastle wrote:
| I see a lot of stuff decrease in quality and increase in
| price. Just this year 2024 bikes in the 2k range now are
| shipping with garage tier SRAM groups instead of last year
| where they had Shimannos. If you want to good stuff it's 2700
| now. Paying more for less is a real drag
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Yes, product changes should be logged IMO so that customers
| can access that information. Companies essentially pass off a
| new product as the old product now, lying to consumers.
| Capitalism relies on informed customers to target purchases
| towards the 'best' products; this breaks that ability. VC
| firms seem to buy well-established companies, reduce the
| quality and ride them into the ground, destroying a lot of
| value that has built up over a long time. Rinse-and-repeat
| and the overall value of products goes down. This is a point
| for government to require a detailed account of products.
|
| It shouldn't be a mystery whether shrinkflation has occurred
| it should say it right on the product, and be confirmed in a
| government verified database.
|
| In the UK it feels more like corrupted consumer protections.
| I suppose that's a type of failed, but it's not because the
| consumer protections were bad, it's because they were removed
| by a government who work for (or just are) the capitalists
| rather than the _demos_.
| qp11 wrote:
| The issues have been well understood for decades but the fixes
| involves dismantling existing power structures so nothing
| simple about it. Short summary of the issues - https://michael-
| hudson.com/2023/07/global-economic-history-i...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _method for understanding the economy is flawed and is not
| properly capturing what all consumers know intuitively_
|
| It's not flawed, economic literacy in the general population
| just sucks and thus so does the popular discourse. The closer
| you are to the minimum wage or tech sector, the worse you're
| doing; the more you make and more assets you have the better
| you're doing [1].
|
| The measures are there. They show a bifurcating economy, and in
| particular, one fracturing along social lines, thereby
| inhibiting information permeation. They're just buried in
| _e.g._ the Fed's Beige Books, which aren't consumed as
| vociferously as TV news.
|
| [1] https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/economic-data-
| paint-a-...
| robotcapital wrote:
| Part of the problem is that that "intuition" changes based on
| how you the ask the question and who you ask it to. A good
| example of this is polling that shows Americans as a whole
| believe the country's finances will be worse off a year from
| now at twice the rate as their own personal finances[0]. So I'd
| argue that even anecdotes and intuition need to be taken with
| grain of salt, particularly given that it's an election year
| with a polarized electorate.
|
| [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/05/23/views-of-
| the...
| pixl97 wrote:
| >polarized electorate
|
| And I would add with a polarized media whos parent companies
| fortunes depend on which people get elected. The amount of
| corporate financed propaganda out there is out of control.
| robotcapital wrote:
| We're getting off on a tangent here about here about the
| mechanism behind that polarization, but it reflects the
| broader point I was trying to make with my comment. That is
| to be skeptical of simplistic answer, like "economic
| termites" or "corporate propaganda", to complex topics like
| the economy or polarization. It might imply an agenda other
| than seeking the truth.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > Our method for understanding the economy is flawed
|
| There is no misunderstanding. In the Soviet Union, the rulers
| and their media would every day report on how fantastical the
| economy was doing and how production was beating records etc.
| Get used, because this will continue for the rest of your life.
| chii wrote:
| But there was shortages of everything in the USSR.
|
| What shortages are there in the US?
| mperham wrote:
| Try to get an appointment to see a doctor.
|
| Food deserts.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| > Try to get an appointment to see a doctor
|
| Done this literally dozens of times over the past couple
| of years for myself, kids, and wife and have never had an
| issue. Even been offered appointments same or next day.
| Am I missing something?
| Izkata wrote:
| Are you urban, suburban, or rural?
|
| Something I've been suspicious of for a while now, the
| farther from the cities the worse it is. Grocery prices,
| for example, didn't start rising in the city I'm in until
| a year or more after I started seeing people complaining
| about it, and a good chunk of them were suburban or
| rural.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| Suburban
| GOD_Over_Djinn wrote:
| Good for you. I had to wait 5 months to see a specialist.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| There are two Americas, the one that HN folks inhabit and the
| underclass.
|
| The former is doing great.
|
| The latter has grown and shifted. I grew up in a rural
| community that was in the process of unraveling from a
| prosperous farming and light industrial area to a rural slum.
| There are zero operational farms in that area today. The one I
| worked for as a teen was in continuous operation since the
| Dutch colonial period.
|
| That's an example of why the nihilism of MAGA is so appealing.
| The world is collapsing around many people.
|
| These issues are caused by demographics and macro trends. The
| laws have changed to facilitate generational wealth transfer,
| and that process will change the way the economy works and
| further fuel unrest. This stuff is unlikely to get fixed in my
| lifetime.
| apsec112 wrote:
| Since 2016, real (inflation-adjusted) wages have risen
| quickly for people in the bottom quartile, while for upper-
| income workers they've been stagnant. Obviously, most people
| on HN are still better off than manual laborers, but the gap
| has narrowed substantially (a big reversal from 1995-2015)
| and that's a good thing.
|
| https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr.
| ..
| lupire wrote:
| That graph shows beginning of a recovery from large wage
| decreased of the last few years. Equality is nice, but the
| main story is that everyone is doing worse.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| I keep telling everyone I know about this and literally
| zero people believe me!
|
| So done with Americans finally getting into boom times and
| still feeling like it's 2008. No one here ever wants to
| admit that they have it good.
| uoaei wrote:
| You are literally the person the article is about.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I don't know if it's being done as a joke or what, but this
| is the exact sort of myopic focus on a single economic
| variable that is being criticized as failing to capture
| economic reality.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yeah, we should be comparing spending power as a very
| slight upgrade to the metric of overall compensation.
|
| And I'm not even sure what this graph is supposed to be
| showing. The biggest difference is when he 1st quartile
| stagnates while the 4th quartile loses 4-5%. 95% of
| $200,000 is still a lot more than even a 100% increase in
| salary for $40,000. my most generous, lazy interpretation
| of this chart shows a whopping $15% increase in wages for
| the first quartile.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Wages are tough in this segment because many households are
| dependent on external non-income benefits. Particularly
| Medicaid and particularly for children.
|
| So if your $16/hr job pops by 30%, the net impact on the
| household is much lower in many cases. For teen workers,
| it's beer money. For single moms, it's a net loss as costs
| for daycare and healthcare have increased 50%.
|
| All of this stuff is relative. I'm a tech exec in a large
| organization, and essentially live the same lifestyle as my
| parents, who were in "lower end" jobs relatively speaking
| in the 80s when I was little.
| ebiester wrote:
| This seems weird to me. What is your savings rate versus
| theirs? I say this because on the surface, the same feels
| true for me, but on closer inspection I spend money like
| water in ways they had tightly controlled. And yet, I
| have a higher savings rate than they did.
|
| (However, I don't have a pension.)
| netbioserror wrote:
| Way to completely miss the anecdotal point about rural
| cultural decay. You can point to a chart showing rising
| wage growth all day, but if it's happening at the expense
| of long-lived communities being hollowed out, you're
| effectively celebrating peoples' destitution.
|
| It is incredible how Internet armchair technocrats will
| attempt to reduce human existence to a few equations and
| wonder why broader populations despise the Ivory Tower.
| rangestransform wrote:
| Rural existence is already subsidized by urban dwellers,
| I dunno what more they expect
| vagrantJin wrote:
| Please elaborate further on what you mean by the phrasing
| of "Rural existence is already subsidized...."
|
| I'm uncertain if I missed the sarcasm or perhaps more
| likely my lack of comprehension.
| netbioserror wrote:
| Inept thinkers really have a way of making themselves
| obvious.
| berniedurfee wrote:
| Wow, I've never heard this sort of urban elitism before!
| Is it common?
| pessimizer wrote:
| This is a bad interpretation of events, and an intentional
| ignoring of wealth gains.
|
| > Since 2016, real (inflation-adjusted) wages have risen
| quickly for people in the bottom quartile
|
| This "quick" wage growth, as you point out with your image,
| is on the order of 1 or 2% for the past few years, and was
| massacred by recent inflation i.e. if raising the minimum
| wage raised your standard of living, you've almost exactly
| kept up with inflation.
|
| Meanwhile, wealth amongst people who hold investments, a
| group that often includes upper-income workers, has
| massively increased during that time. The S&P has had a
| 130% adjusted return since 2016. The share of wealth held
| by the top 10% is as high or higher than it was in 2016.
| boppo1 wrote:
| >real (inflation-adjusted) wages
|
| lol.
|
| The whole point of this discussion is that our metrics are
| not properly measuring things. The reported inflation
| number is a joke. See: anything in life that matters like -
| a house - a car - an education - health care - raising a
| kid - basically any life-milestone
|
| but TVs and electronic toys have never been cheaper so it's
| all okay! Hedonic adjustment!
| prisenco wrote:
| | _an education_
|
| The community college in the area I briefly lived growing
| up was $17 a credit hour in 1997. Inflation adjusted
| that's $31.67 a credit hour.
|
| It's now nearly $140 a credit hour. Almost 4.5x more than
| inflation.
|
| For a community college.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| Probably considerably cheaper than the University and you
| can always transfer after 2 years.
| tarsinge wrote:
| The global inflation is exactly the kind of insufficient
| metric the parent is talking about. What about salaries
| compared to necessities like food and shelter? Global
| inflation is only meaningful for upper income workers that
| have significant disposable income.
| nequo wrote:
| > There are two Americas, the one that HN folks inhabit and
| the underclass.
|
| > The former is doing great.
|
| This is at odds with what I've been hearing on HN and in
| adjacent places. For a year or two now, people have been
| saying that finding a job in tech has become much harder.
| Some say that it hasn't been this bad in a decade. Some say
| it hasn't been this bad since the dotcom bubble burst.
| api wrote:
| It's harder than it was a few years ago to find a six
| figure upwardly mobile job.
|
| This is a different world from the one where hundreds of
| thousands are committing suicide with fentanyl.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I'd take any job, but very few bites outside of tech. So
| chasing that tech job is literally my path of least
| resistance.
| epolanski wrote:
| Just because IT sector has lows, doesn't mean it's a bad
| one suddenly.
| ghaff wrote:
| Generalizations are always only somewhat true.
|
| But what you're probably seeing is a reaction to the end of
| a period when, assuming at least a pulse and some vague
| familiarity with computers (and maybe some ability to
| navigate tech interviews), you could walk out of a job on
| Friday and have multiple offers within a week.
|
| This was basically never the norm with most professional
| jobs that could take months of job-hunting with no
| guarantee of a higher salary or not needing to move. I was
| very lucky over time and it always depended on professional
| connections.
|
| A lot of people got accustomed to a period that was nothing
| like the historical norm. I expect very few of them have
| taken fast food jobs which absolutely happened in 2001.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > you could walk out of a job on Friday and have multiple
| offers within a week. This was basically never the norm
| with most professional jobs that could take months of
| job-hunting with no guarantee of a higher salary or not
| needing to move.
|
| This was never really the -norm- in tech either. Yes, a
| small number of very talented, very well-connected
| software engineers with well-known schools or companies
| on their resume, could probably leave a job one week and
| have multiple offers next week, but come on... This has
| never really been the experience of the vast majority of
| tech workers.
|
| Sure, if you survey Stanford graduates, working in a hot
| domain, in top companies Silicon Valley, you're going to
| conclude that getting jobs has always been easy "in
| tech."
| ghaff wrote:
| Totally fair. But that was the narrative. And, yeah,
| there's been a shift from the "narrative" and I have
| three "full-time" jobs to I can't get a new job offer in
| spite of thousands of applications but that was never
| really the norm in either case.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >This was basically never the norm with most professional
| jobs that could take months of job-hunting with no
| guarantee of a higher salary or not needing to move.
|
| It's not the norm for most professional jobs to need to
| study content unrelated to the actual responsibilities
| for your role, and going through 3-5+ stages of
| interviews just to get a thumbs up. no other sector is
| studying interview questions on the side. they either
| have a standardized license exam to vet their technical
| expertise, can do a contract/trial period to show their
| chops ("contractors" in tech aren't really a
| "downgrade"/less compensated role like in other
| industries), or otherwise have testing that closely
| mirrors their day to day.
|
| >I expect very few of them have taken fast food jobs
| which absolutely happened in 2001.
|
| I was in elementary for 2001, so I can't comment much on
| 2001 or 2009. I have indeed heard some of those people
| consider 2023/4 to be even worse for the market, however.
| Just "being good at your job" isn't enough these days,
| where it sounds like that sufficed in 2001, and the study
| space for 2009 was at least manageable. But that's
| secondhand accounts.
| jurassic wrote:
| A small percent of tech workers struggling to get a job
| doesn't change the overall picture that most people working
| in tech are living relatively prosperous and comfortable
| lives. We are paid at a level that means we don't feel
| stressed at the grocery store figuring out how to feed our
| kids or wonder how will we get to work when our cars break
| down. And as a bonus, we get to sit comfortably in air-
| conditioned rooms and spend a good chunk of our day
| thinking about things we actually take some enjoyment from.
|
| None of this is true for the "underclass" mentioned above
| who have little to look forward to each day; the labor they
| provide is in various amounts
| boring/tedious/demeaning/physical, and doesn't pay enough
| to give them the middle class lifestyle they feel entitled
| to (e.g. home ownership, healthcare, etc).
|
| I and many people I know have gone through job searches
| over the last 18 months. Yes, it was more work than we've
| come to expect over the last 10 years. But ultimately
| everyone I know has landed on their feet. As an industry we
| are still incredibly privileged compared to most.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >I and many people I know have gone through job searches
| over the last 18 months. Yes, it was more work than we've
| come to expect over the last 10 years. But ultimately
| everyone I know has landed on their feet. As an industry
| we are still incredibly privileged compared to most.
|
| it's 50/50 in my circle. And I got the losing coin toss.
| Pretty much everyone in my circle got at least a threat
| of a lay off at some point except one person (and that
| company is in a very special situation). some got jobs
| quickly, to various levels of satisfaction. Some got laid
| off and then went back to the same company when they
| happened to secure a new project. I'd mostly prefer some
| stability over how well off I'll be when I'm 65. I'm not
| even sure I'll make it there at this rate.
|
| >None of this is true for the "underclass" mentioned
| above who have little to look forward to each day
|
| it's all relative, which is why this is hard to contain
| to a long term chart of "tech is still better off". No
| one wants to be caught off guard, doing interviews as a
| full time job for a year a income dwindles (so
| underselling it as "it's more work than we come to expect
| over the last 10 years" is underselling it). And even for
| the tech workers willing to work in the "underclass"
| jobs, it's not that much easier getting a job. Especially
| in my area that seems to have a higher than usual
| unemployment rate.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > by demographics and macro trends.
|
| fully agree, and also taxation, access to credit and leverage
| for profitable assets, many legal loopholes..
|
| Pickitty says in-part that rewards are disproportionately
| moving to capital assets, at the same time devaluing the
| fundamental components of life and liberty .. food stocks,
| common labor, political freedoms from taxation
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty
|
| Intuition says that increased surveillance by law enforcement
| to produce convictions that cost money and time are
| economically crippling to building a middle class from a
| labor pool and small-holder individuals. A people without
| hope and progress become mired in common failure and produce
| a downward spiral of personal life, as described.
| paulmd wrote:
| When the proverbial one-horse town/single-industry company
| town has the single-industry leave town, what exactly do you
| want anyone to do about it?
|
| We already shovel in far more tax dollars maintaining
| infrastructure for a handful of remaining occupants even when
| the economic activity no longer justifies the spend. What
| further burden, exactly, do you think the rest of the world
| owes ex-rural communities that have deindustrialized like
| this?
|
| I've been to places like this around here, where mining towns
| have dried up and there's only a few early-20th-century dams
| marking anything at all. You have to drive into unmarked, un-
| google-mappable state land through the fire roads (the kind
| of thing that gets people killed-by-GPS out west) to even get
| there etc, and there used to be a whole town there once for
| the mines. Serious/honest question, what does the broader
| public really owe that miner?
|
| America needs to have some hard talks about what to do in
| these (extremely frequent) situations, because infrastructure
| can't be an indefinite commitment once the communities that
| sustain it wither and shrivel away. And it sucks for the
| handful of holdouts who don't want to leave, but the
| community itself is really already dead. If there are 30
| people who don't want to leave their homes, do we keep paving
| roads and delivering US mail and maintaining hundreds of
| miles of power lines for the 30 people who won't leave?
|
| That's maybe viable when it's a rare situation, but it's not,
| anymore - America is folding back inwards after over-
| expanding during the railroad and industrial eras. There are
| a _lot_ of "railroad towns" where the trains no longer stop,
| so to speak. And once "the mine dries up", and those arteries
| stop pumping, people move on. What do we do about the ones
| who won't? Society is probably "in the hole" (net economic
| activity) to the tune of millions of dollars of
| infrastructure per resident, perhaps tens of millions in some
| cases, over their lifetime.
|
| A lot of these places literally have population density of
| sub-1-person-per-sq-mile, there are whole regions with
| sub-10. It's gauche to say it, but at the end of the day
| everyone knows there is a number when it's worth it and a
| number when it's not - just like statistical value of life.
| And at some point, if the taxpayer is kicking in tens of
| millions of dollars of artificial subsidy, it's becoming a
| lifestyle choice that we choose to subsidize. By all means
| offer them a great deal to buy their property and bulldoze
| it... but at the end of the day we can't keep paving roads
| onto mountains just because 10 people don't want to move.
| _That_ is an economic termite right there - and they would
| use _far_ less charitable terms to describe the situation, if
| the tables were reversed.
|
| I feel for people who have to leave their lives behind etc,
| but infrastructure isn't a suicide pact either. It's not a
| permanent, lifelong commitment even when the fundamentals on
| the ground totally change - and not everyone is a legacy
| homeowner to begin with.
|
| http://travelthemitten.com/landmarks/redridge-steel-dam-
| an-e...
|
| https://99wfmk.com/redridge-michigan/
|
| > Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
|
| > Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
|
| > The high and lonely hills stretch far away.
| paulmd wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaFkXsdr0mk
|
| (incidentally, this flow over the base of the dam is new,
| looks like since 2018 (it normally goes through culverts at
| the base) and the dam likely won't survive much longer,
| some of the supports have already broken loose and the
| water flow is eroding the concrete, probably quite rapidly
| given the age/neglect...)
|
| https://www.mininggazette.com/news/features/2020/08/survivi
| n...
| ryandrake wrote:
| > That's an example of why the nihilism of MAGA is so
| appealing. The world is collapsing around many people.
|
| And this is what I don't get about current US politics. MAGA
| = Republicans. The Republican party _is_ the party of
| generational wealth transfer. The Republican party _is_ the
| party of elite businessmen lording over the working class.
| The Republican party _is_ the party of all the economic
| forces that are unraveling rural communities and turning them
| into slums. They 're voting for and supporting the very
| politicians who are "collapsing the world" around themselves.
| But why? It's not just idle nihilism. They're one of the most
| actively engaged political demographics in recent memory. Is
| the Culture War so important/motivating to these people that
| they are willing to help implement their own economic
| destruction?
| ncallaway wrote:
| The people implementing the economic destruction are
| promising a silver bullet to instantly fix everything.
|
| The people who promise modest, incremental improvement are
| _much_ less appealing in that environment.
| pessimizer wrote:
| You shouldn't confuse your stereotypes of people for actual
| people.
|
| > The Republican party is the party of generational wealth
| transfer.
|
| I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. The Republican
| party is half the country.
|
| "Demographic data compiled in the 2016 and 2020 elections
| showed that the top 40 percent of income earners preferred
| the Democratic candidate for president (Hillary Clinton or
| Joe Biden) over the Republican (Donald Trump), signifying a
| sizable coalition shift from where the party was in the
| previous decade."
|
| https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-being-party-rich-could-
| co...
|
| "Some recent US figures on the distribution of income by
| party: 65 percent of taxpayer households that earn more
| than $500,000 per year are now in Democratic districts; 74
| percent of the households in Republican districts earn less
| than $100,00 per year. Add to this what we knew already,
| namely that the 10 richest congressional districts in the
| country all have Democratic representatives in Congress.
| The above numbers incidentally come from the Internal
| Revenue Service, via Bloomberg, and are likely to be more
| reliable than if they came from Project Veritas via
| theblaze.com."
|
| https://www.thenation.com/article/society/democrats-rich-
| par...
|
| > The Republican party is the party of all the economic
| forces that are unraveling rural communities and turning
| them into slums.
|
| All of them?
|
| "For decades, the Republicans were seen as the party of big
| business. Their support for low taxes and light regulation
| was manna to executives eager to raise profits and avoid
| government entanglements, and chief executives and big
| companies were reliable funders of Republicans up and down
| the ballot.
|
| "Mr. Trump has frayed those bonds. Four years ago, few
| major chief executives supported Mr. Trump during his first
| campaign. And throughout his time in the White House,
| executives from many of the company's biggest brands
| publicly sparred with the president on everything from gun
| control to climate change to immigration.
|
| "'I can't remember a time when the business community has
| spoken out so strongly in opposition to an administration
| on so many important issues,' said Rich Lesser, chief
| executive of Boston Consulting Group."
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/business/republicans-
| busi...
|
| > Is the Culture War so important/motivating to these
| people that they are willing to help implement their own
| economic destruction?
|
| This is the culture war. You're doing it right now.
| mptest wrote:
| >> The Republican party is the party of generational
| wealth transfer.
|
| >I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean.
|
| They oppose estate or "death" taxes in general. That is
| what they mean.
|
| >The Republican party is half the country.
|
| They're half of voters. They haven't won the popular vote
| in how many years? 40? They're an obnoxiously loud
| minority.
|
| >All of them?
|
| Probably not all, but nearly all. The maga tariffs and
| then subsequent bailouts of farmers harmed comes to mind.
| reagan's austerity is another easy example.
|
| >>Is the Culture War so important/motivating to these
| people that they are willing to help implement their own
| economic destruction? This is the culture war.
|
| >You're doing it right now.
|
| No, they aren't. The republicans bemoaning the 1% of
| people who identify as trans to distract their uneducated
| voters while banning books and attacking public education
| funding, libraries, women's rights, etc, are.
|
| Don't fall in to the bothersider ism trap. Look at
| republican policy in a red state like texas[0] to see why
| the comment you replied to is the truth.
|
| [0] https://www.chron.com/politics/article/texas-
| gop-2024-priori...
| bequanna wrote:
| The estate tax doesn't mean too much.
|
| "Generational wealth" is generally a myth. The second and
| third generations burn through any inheritance and sprint
| back to middle class rather quickly.
| gwd wrote:
| > "Generational wealth" is generally a myth. The second
| and third generations burn through any inheritance and
| sprint back to middle class rather quickly.
|
| Ref? That was definitely not my impression from listening
| to "Capital in the 21st Century".
| bequanna wrote:
| Piketty is not my favorite. I consider him a pure
| academic who tends to cherry pick data.
|
| In reality, wealth tends to cluster around people who are
| good stewards of it. They allocate capital efficiently
| and we are all better off.
|
| The government is NOT a good steward of wealth. They
| allocate inefficiently (because no accountability) so we
| should minimize what we give them.
|
| Here is a quick and dirty reference discussing how lazy
| kids of rich people blow it:
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/generational-wealth-curse-
| cau...
| elliotto wrote:
| This is wild to disagree with Pikettys magnum opus with a
| reference to a yahoo finance news article
| scrubadub wrote:
| > The republicans bemoaning the 1% of people who identify
| as trans to distract their uneducated voters
|
| They're reacting to policy overreach by progressives.
| There's no good reason why everything that's been set up
| for women now has to include any male who says he's a
| woman. Yet this is what's happened in recent years.
|
| Yes it's unfortunate that it has to be the Republicans
| pushing back against this in terms of introducing actual
| policy, but at least they're fixing the problem.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I'm doing awful, personally. But I guess my industry is an
| exception among exceptions. Still feels bad.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The vibecession isn't totally wrong, there are a lot of
| paradoxes you hear when you ask people about how they're doing
| vs how other people are doing, Paul Krugman has covered this a
| bit.
|
| The middle class and up is doing well, basically anyone who has
| mortgage debt and a white collar job. Lower classes were doing
| well due to pandemic wage gains, but inflation and housing
| prices have now outpaced those.
| hanniabu wrote:
| > is not properly capturing what all consumers know
|
| Yeah because every time a metric looks bad it gets adjusted to
| look better either by changing the weights or removing items
| from the calculation which dilutes it's effectiveness
| greesil wrote:
| Ezra Klein just had a very relevant podcast on this.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
| gruez wrote:
| >I think this goes the other way around. Our method for
| understanding the economy is flawed and is not properly
| capturing what all consumers know intuitively, things kind of
| suck, even when you have a job and even when you're still
| buying things.
|
| It seems kind of lazy to observe that anecdotes contradict
| statistics, and then conclude that it's the statistics are
| wrong without providing any empirical evidence to the contrary.
| This style of argumentation basically allows you to make
| whatever "intuitive" claim you want and handwave any empirical
| evidence to the contrary because the empirical evidence isn't
| "capturing what [we] all know intuitively".
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Anecdote would be saying that some individual over on 4th
| Street feels that things aren't that great. "Consumer
| sentiment" (or whatever name) is actually a statistic.
|
| So now you're at two statistics, one that measures economic
| activity in jobs and output, and the other that measures
| peoples' intuitive feel of the economy. I think the gap
| between them might be that peoples' confidence was shaken by
| inflation reigniting after 15 years.
| gruez wrote:
| But polls show that around of population are flat out wrong
| on certain objective measures, like GDP, the S&P 500 index,
| and the unemployment rate[1]. If they can't get basic
| factual questions right, why should we put much stock in
| their "intuitive feel of the economy"?
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-
| news/article/2024/may/22/poll...
| Izkata wrote:
| That's exactly the point - there's some sort of
| disconnect and people just want to say "they're wrong"
| instead of trying to figure out why people feel that way.
| gruez wrote:
| >people just want to say "they're wrong" instead of
| trying to figure out why people feel that way.
|
| Why are these two things positioned as
| opposing/contradictory? Why can't those people be wrong
| but we still try to figure out why they think that way?
| CPLX wrote:
| Ask yourself the reverse question now.
|
| Why can't it be true that the economics profession is
| wrong, or better yet "not even wrong" and not really even
| talking about anything that has real world applicability?
|
| Given the last few decades that should probably be the
| starting premise of any analysis.
| gruez wrote:
| >Why can't it be true that the economics profession is
| wrong, or better yet "not even wrong" and not really even
| talking about anything that has real world applicability?
|
| I'm not ruling it out, only pointing out that it's a lazy
| argument to handwave away the statistics while not
| providing evidence that's equal or better than the ones
| you're trying to refute. This is especially true when the
| discrepancy is from a group of people who can't get basic
| facts right. Maybe they're actually right but there's
| some contrived reason they're not answering
| straightforward factual questions correctly, or maybe
| they're just wrong.
| CPLX wrote:
| Guys this isn't that complicated.
|
| Basically every commercial interaction you have these
| days involves someone trying to cheat you, with basically
| no way to find recourse to human understanding or help.
|
| It's every day, every time you interact with a
| corporation as a consumer. It fucking sucks profoundly
| and people are completely exhausted by it.
|
| Have you really not noticed?
| gruez wrote:
| But the questions isn't "how do you feel about the
| economy", it's "do you think the s&p 500 went up or
| down". Even if you think the stockmarket is fake and
| disconnected from what actually happens on main st, you
| should still be able to correctly answer whether it went
| up or not. Failing to do so shows that either you have no
| grasp on how the S&P 500 is actually doing, can't hold
| opposing concepts it your head (ie. the "real economy" is
| doing shit but the S&P 500 is doing great), or can't
| follow basic instructions. Neither makes me confident in
| other things you're saying, like how how good the economy
| is.
| CPLX wrote:
| > you should still be able to correctly answer whether it
| went up or not
|
| Why? Who fucking cares?
|
| Some guy calls my phone during dinner with some survey
| about the economy. I answer every question with a
| variation on "fuck you and your economy" and then hang
| up.
|
| I grew up in a family of social scientists and yet it
| still shocks me how much people actually believe the
| words "studies say" and "experts insist" when it comes to
| matters of human sentiment and opinion.
| gruez wrote:
| >I grew up in a family of social scientists and yet it
| still shocks me how much people actually believe the
| words "studies say" and "experts insist" when it comes to
| matters of human sentiment and opinion.
|
| But the question we're asking isn't "how people feel
| about the economy", it's "how the economy is actually
| doing". I don't think anyone here is seriously arguing
| that the public is wrong about their own "sentiment and
| opinion". They're going to be right almost by definition.
| What is actually being disputed is whether public's
| "sentiment and opinion" actually reflects reality. To
| that question I don't see why we should give unlimited
| credence to "human sentiment and opinion".
| CPLX wrote:
| Do they get a reward for being "right" in the eyes of the
| survey company or something? They are being asked how the
| economy is doing and they are saying fuck this. I'm
| guessing people have a basic sense that when they answer
| a media survey they're contributing to the narrative that
| the media will use, and they want the narrative to be
| this sucks. It's really not that deep.
|
| As for "sentiment and opinion" it's the basis for
| democracy. Of course we should give unlimited credence to
| it when deciding how to organize society, what's the
| other approach?
| gruez wrote:
| >Do they get a reward for being "right" in the eyes of
| the survey company or something? They are being asked how
| the economy is doing and they are saying fuck this. I'm
| guessing people have a basic sense that when they answer
| a media survey they're contributing to the narrative that
| the media will use, and they want the narrative to be
| this sucks. It's really not that deep.
|
| They don't, but like I said earlier it's fair to question
| the veracity of their statements if they can't get
| objective questions right. Moreover, if it's really the
| case as you claim that they don't care about the object
| level question and only care about "the narrative", what
| makes you think that the "the narrative" stops at the
| economy and not at some high level like "the political
| system" or "society"? In other words what makes you think
| they actually think the economy is doing bad, and they're
| not answering dishonestly because they're disaffected
| about the government/politics/society as a whole?
|
| >As for "sentiment and opinion" it's the basis for
| democracy. Of course we should give unlimited credence to
| it when deciding how to organize society, what's the
| other approach?
|
| Again, you're conflating "how people feel about the
| economy" and "how the economy is actually doing".
| Moreover, "sentiment and opinion" might be "the basis for
| democracy", but it doesn't follow that when it comes to
| factual and objective questions it should get unlimited
| credence.
| CPLX wrote:
| > Again, you're conflating "how people feel about the
| economy" and "how the economy is actually doing".
|
| Indeed. And you're suffering from the delusion that
| there's some kind of distinction here that matters.
|
| There isn't. The economy fucking sucks. It sucks because
| normal people feel trapped and helpless in the face of
| corporate power and constant, rampant unethical conduct
| and cheating that seems to permeate literally every daily
| commercial interaction. When you ask them about the
| economy they answer that it fucking sucks, because, it
| does, for them, daily. This is bad and it keeps making
| people's daily lives worse.
|
| If you haven't experienced that then congratulations,
| you're either living a very isolated or minimalist life
| or you have financial resources that put you above this
| dynamic. Or maybe you don't live in the US. Or maybe
| you're building the tools and processes that are
| inflicting this misery on others. Who knows.
|
| But my argument is that most readers of this article and
| comment thread should be able to look around and realize
| what's happening without resorting to regression
| analysis. I think most people here have cushy employment
| for the most part so you'll have to look elsewhere. Have
| you tried to interact with an airline lately? Healthcare
| billing? A bank?
|
| It's a fucking horror show. Now, extraplolate what that
| experience would be like if it was every single part of
| your actual job. Like you actually worked for a company
| that treats you, the employee, the way Comcast treats you
| when you want to cancel service?
|
| Ever tried getting someone from Uber to talk to you as a
| customer? You think they treat drivers differently? What
| if you're driving for them to feed your children? What
| kind of mood would you be in? How would you think "the
| economy" is going?
|
| Did you know that you can apply, get hired, and actually
| start work at an Amazon warehouse _without speaking
| verbally to a single human being ever_? Like you
| literally go online and fill out forms, go to a building
| and use a kiosk to check in, and so on, and are on the
| job without a single conversation.
|
| Can you try to actually really think about what being in
| this economy _feels like_ to most people?
|
| Now call them and ask them how the economy is doing. Do
| you think they trust you, an educated social scientist
| employed at faceless corporation that is calling them to
| publish some news report on what they think? Do you think
| they're interested in impressing you with their stock
| market fluency? To the extent they are willing to talk to
| you at all it's in the hopes that you'll fucking listen
| to them when they tell you to _fucking do something about
| this_ for once.
|
| For half a dozen cycles in a row voters have picked the
| person they thought was least in service of the assholes
| who are in charge and inflicting this on everyone,
| increasingly agitated that nobody actually fucking does
| anything about it. They'll be doing it again later this
| year.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Yeah. For normal people, "I am the economy". That is, I
| don't care about the national economy or the world
| economy. I don't care about how many widgets get produced
| this month. What difference does it make to me if the
| national economy is doing great, but I'm going broke? I
| care whether I can afford to buy what I need this month.
| To me, _that 's_ the economy.
|
| (With "I" meaning the average person, not me personally.)
| gruez wrote:
| Yet as a whole, people estimate the nation's economy
| worse than their own. Clearly this can't be the case if
| everyone thinks their economic circumstances are the
| nation's economic circumstances, because if that were the
| case you'd expect them to align on a national basis.
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/05/23/views-of-
| the...
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I think you could (almost) build a consistent picture:
| Economic output is doing well, a lot of people are
| working, but the rich are taking all the gains and the
| workers are just barely surviving.
|
| The problem is, if that's the case, who's buying all the
| output? It's not just going into warehouses. So people
| must be able to buy all this stuff.
|
| An alternate view would be that people _have_ been buying
| all this stuff, mostly on credit, and are realizing that
| they 're maxed out on credit, especially if interest
| rates rise.
|
| But ultimately, the "sentiment" view matters. It may not
| matter as much as the actual output numbers, but it
| matters, because people are not purely "homo economicus".
| They make decisions on how they feel about how things are
| going, and if they think things are going badly, they buy
| less, and eventually that influences the actual figures.
| CPLX wrote:
| > I think you could (almost) build a consistent picture:
| Economic output is doing well, a lot of people are
| working, but the rich are taking all the gains and the
| workers are just barely surviving.
|
| You figured it out.
|
| Maybe replace "the rich" with "those with capital and
| market power" but that's mostly a distinction without a
| difference.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Could you now address the objection? If that's the case,
| who's buying all the output?
| gruez wrote:
| >Indeed. And you're suffering from the delusion that
| there's some kind of distinction here that matters.
|
| >There isn't.
|
| the distinction does matter because policy discussion
| should be around facts rather than vibes. Voters are the
| ultimate arbiters for what policy should be, but that
| doesn't mean we should shrug when their beliefs are
| objectively wrong.
|
| > The economy fucking sucks. It sucks because [...]
|
| All the points you've made about bad the economy talks
| past the points raised by mainstream economists. Sure,
| "trapped and helpless in the face of corporate power"
| isn't great, but how does that compare to 10%
| unemployment, or an actual recession? What makes for a
| economy that doesn't "fucking sucks"? More to the point,
| vibecession might have started post pandemic, but
| everything you said existed to some extent pre-pandemic.
| Has "corporate power and constant, rampant unethical
| conduct and cheating" actually gotten worse? Or did the
| _perception_ get worse? That 's the problem with going
| off vibes. Because there's no attempt to quantify it,
| it's possible to know whether something actually got
| worse, or people merely thought it got worse. You argue
| that people "should be able to look around and realize
| what's happening without resorting to regression
| analysis", but this comment section is full of examples
| where people were misinformed about various things (eg.
| objective economic measures or crime stats). You end up
| having to come up with contrived explanations to explain
| their behavior (ie. them being wrong on factual questions
| shouldn't impact their credibility because they're being
| wrong to express rage against the system).
| ramblenode wrote:
| > It seems kind of lazy to observe that anecdotes contradict
| statistics, and then conclude that it's the statistics are
| wrong without providing any empirical evidence to the
| contrary.
|
| Anecdotes are empirical evidence. Statistics are just
| collections of anecdotes obtained through systematized
| processes. As such, statistics are only as good as the
| process. 1 good observation can be better than 100 bad
| observations.
| gruez wrote:
| If you want to be nitpicky I suppose you can claim that
| anecdotes is technically evidence and therefore that
| statement is incorrect, but in the context of that comment
| it doesn't change much. We basically have data collected by
| statisticians at government agencies compared to...
| people's vibes. As you said yourself "1 good observation
| can be better than 100 bad observations", so I still think
| it's a poor argument to claim the professional statistics
| are wrong, and the only evidence you have is evidence
| that's worse than the ones you're trying to refute.
| braiamp wrote:
| > economists unduly focus on a few metrics of dubious quality
|
| Which is funny, because as economist, half of the material is
| "these metric don't matter, if there's no benefit for the
| population, but you can't ignore them either". It can be
| summarized as something like "economic indicators are not
| perfect measures of general well-being, but you need the
| indicators to look good to be able to distribute well-being".
|
| The thing is, that the public doesn't get that _nuance_. Good
| economist know that a growing GPD doesn't mean that everyone is
| feeling good, but also knows that a shrinking one means that
| most will fell bad.
| creer wrote:
| So perhaps economists need to work on this "comm" issue. At
| least the ones involved in government stats. "It's not their
| job" only if they actively make it not their job.
|
| I ran into this with NASA. A NASA "scientist" insisted it was
| proper for them and their colleagues to ignore both valid and
| crackpot suggestions or questions on the rationale that
| "crackpots are gonna crackpot and they have limited time so
| the proper response was to just ignore everyone and
| everything except their (collectively) narrow research
| projects." - Which are each extremely specific and grounded
| in massive piles of internal assumptions as to what matters.
| There was zero interest in the idea that they were paid by
| the public and might want to improve their image now and
| then.
| hehdhdjehehegwv wrote:
| My theory is the pandemic exposed the bear minimum people will
| accept and society won't collapse.
|
| Companies learned the true baseline of what they can get away
| with and we're in a new permanent reality of everything sucking
| right up to the exact line where it would collapse of it sucked
| more.
| tuatoru wrote:
| Just listened to a podcast that pointed out that housing is
| expensive, education is expensive, childcare is expensive, cars
| are expensive, and money is expensive (interest rates are
| high). And out of pocket expenses for healthcare are going up
| and up.
|
| Economists don't have a handle on the compromises and
| adaptations that people have been making over the last decade
| or more, e.g. moving to the cheaper place further out of town
| rather than where they want to live, or house-sharing rather
| than living as a couple.
|
| It seems people are at the limit of the adaptations they can
| make and are pretty pissed off about it.
| bwanab wrote:
| The personal experience of the economy isn't quite as you make
| it. In polls, people do complain about the national economy
| being in terrible shape, but by a fairly good margin report
| that their own finances are in good shape. It's hard to weave a
| coherent narrative from those contradictory data.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| This discrepancy is easy to explain. My personal finances are
| quite fine but I have a LOT of friends who have to make a
| living doing several gig jobs. Said friends are, on paper,
| employed, and are getting by. But they are quite miserable:
| stressed, overworked, no leisure time and no benefits.
|
| That's why the article author is correct that macro stats
| aren't good at capturing the quality of the lived experiences
| of people - just the quantities.
| throwaway63467 wrote:
| I think in many areas the name of the game is to move the entire
| market to a place where no real competition is possible. Housing
| in most parts of the world is a good example, there's no reason
| prices for housing should've gone up 300-400 % above inflation as
| we really haven't run out of space in most places, yet here we
| are. I have a hard time believing this is just the outcome of
| unfortunate market conditions, it seems quite engineered to me.
| patrickmay wrote:
| Housing costs are primarily due to zoning and other local and
| state government policies that limit or prohibit construction.
| throwaway63467 wrote:
| And these policies come into place all by themselves?
| patrickmay wrote:
| Of course not, but the policies are driven by politics that
| prevent the market from providing what people want. High
| housing prices aren't a market failure, they are due to
| NIMBYism.
| pixl97 wrote:
| This is a yes and no thing and can wildly vary.
|
| In states that have much lower rates of regulation, house
| prices are still up off the charts, yea, still way lower
| than California, but they have pushed prices out of reach
| of the people that live there, so there has to be
| multiple pieces occurring (for example low interest rates
| for a very long time).
| pydry wrote:
| Housing went up globally because of local policies all across
| the world all at the same time, huh?
|
| Perhaps housing went up because of a global increase in
| wealth inequality.
| gruez wrote:
| >Housing went up globally because of local policies all
| across the world all at the same time, huh?
|
| 1. source for "Housing went up globally"?
|
| 2. You don't really need every jurisdiction to by NIMBY for
| global house prices to go up. For instance if half the
| world is NIMBY and the other half is "meh", and housing
| prices in the NIMBY half went up 50% while the other half
| stayed the same, you'd still observe that "Housing went up
| globally".
| detourdog wrote:
| In Massachusetts we have to follow international building
| codes with some commonwealth wide modifications.
| detourdog wrote:
| Those aren't invalid things to drive a markets costs. I would
| say modern building codes that are used to ensure safety
| standards and accessibility are true drivers of cost.
| Achieving new standards without a cost increase is
| unrealistic. Older higher quality doors need to be replaced
| with inferior quality doors that have UL stickers.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I don't believe these changes can drive such an absurd
| increase in housing costs.
| megaman821 wrote:
| Structures do cost more. This is mostly increases in
| labor and code compliance costs. In hot markets the
| structure cost is dwarfed by the land cost though. There
| is only so much prime real estate available. That won't
| stop techies from trying to build a house in a factory to
| bring down prices, even though that makes little sense.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Here, in Ireland, the cost is pushed up mostly by
| planning. There's plenty of space, but due to planning
| (mostly limited by NIMBYs and apparently professional
| objectors), it is difficult to actually get approval for
| anything.
|
| There's plenty of space and myriad of old houses in a
| state of decomposition, but only houses can be built, and
| apartments are scarce. People are going into bidding wars
| where you need to throw an extra 20% just to win the bid.
|
| It certainly isn't the cost of materials or labor costs.
| detourdog wrote:
| They did for my project. Code compliance number driver of
| cost by a longshot in change of use renovation project.
| The sprinkler system and the 4' vertical lift cost as
| much as the 12,000 sq foot building on 1 acre.
| bobajeff wrote:
| Speaking of housing it looks to me like housing costs are
| having the biggest effect on the economy as it typically costs
| more than a third of income for most people. It's probably the
| biggest cost of living expense and so the reason people are
| asking for higher wages and why running small businesses is
| becoming harder or impossible. I'm sure the dominos don't stop
| there either.
| nv-vn wrote:
| >Today, Verisign is the single most profitable company in the
| stock market, a great example of an economic termite
|
| This is just blatantly false. VeriSign is in fact the 1215th most
| profitable company in the stock market [1]. By operating margin,
| it's 155th [2]. I find it hard to give an article much credit
| when I can't even get past the introduction without having to
| comb through citationless false/misleading statements.
|
| [1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/most-profitable-
| companies/pag...
|
| [2] https://companiesmarketcap.com/top-companies-by-operating-
| ma...
| snozolli wrote:
| Verisign has a profit of around $1B with around 1k employees.
|
| Ingersoll Rand has around 18k employees. SBI holdings has
| around 19k. Beiersdorf has around 21k.
|
| I don't know what the author was thinking or why it was phrased
| that way, but Verisign seems vastly more profitable _per
| employee_ than others on the list. Also, I have no idea why
| they even need ~1k employees.
| jensenbox wrote:
| Adobe
| gmuslera wrote:
| Termites or some kind of blood-sucking parasite? Something bigger
| than fleas, maybe ticks? The effect is different, and ones are
| meant for i.e. buildings and the other for living thing.
|
| I see that as taxes, imposed by some private entity instead of
| the government, and without potential benefits for you as some
| taxes may be.
|
| And if is that role, there are more direct imposed players that
| somewhat suck money to let the system work, starting with some
| banking and insurance.
| DarkContinent wrote:
| Re LinkedIn as an example of an economic termite:
|
| It's certainly true that LinkedIn is the go to for white collar
| professionals seeking to make their resumes visible passively to
| recruiters. But isn't life still easier with LinkedIn than in the
| before times, when recruiters would dig deep to get folks' phone
| numbers and then have to call each of those people individually?
| (I think the modern equivalent would be email addresses.)
|
| It's true that LinkedIn makes recruiting much easier to scale to
| a mass market. And it's also true that it has a monopoly on that
| scaling for professional employees. But is it fair to call them
| an economic termite when it's still possible to do sourcing in an
| admittedly clunky and old fashioned way? Just because they have a
| monopoly on scaled recruiting doesn't mean that they hold all the
| cards the way Linde (also in the profile) would in the gas
| market. This is particularly borne out by the existence of Indeed
| or Stack Overflow as options for posting your resume for
| recruiting.
| nutrie wrote:
| Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. It's not the point. Lawyers tend
| to puff their smokescreens, convincing people antitrust agenda
| is difficult. It isn't. Once you start eating a certain amount
| of the pie, the rules of the game change for you, and you only,
| because you become too strong, causing imbalance and
| threatening stability.
|
| I'm sure LinkedIn's legal department employs an army of
| antitrust specialists frequently dealing with accusations from
| their competitors. That's a good thing.
|
| There's one position you never wanna be in: When you don't have
| a choice, and it doesn't matter whether you're a company or an
| individual. Autodesk is one prime example of a long-term nasty
| sales behavior significantly distorting the market. Last but
| not least, democratic governments around the globe have been
| failing to enforce these laws, not to mention these are in many
| cases too permissive in the first place.
| hobs wrote:
| 2022 Stack discontinued their job posting options as it was not
| viable.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I wouldn't use Stack Overflow as an example of the market not
| being viable. 2022 SO had a horrible reputation problem, and
| their main value proposition (that is, qualifying the
| candidates) used a metric that was completely broken and
| probably counterproductive in practice (but we can't know
| that one for sure).
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| LinkedIn is eating both sides of the pie; 50 eur for premium,
| it's ridiculous and we are here because we really have no
| choice.
| doe_eyes wrote:
| What I find odd about the article is that it does very little to
| substantiate its core claim - that the reason the economy is
| broken are small monopolists-but-not-really-monopolists who are
| trying to fleece you.
|
| It opens with the example of rising construction costs. The only
| remotely relevant example here is Autodesk, but by the article's
| own admission, "the cost of these products remains relatively
| minor". And that's an overstatement: they are negligible. I guess
| Assa Abloy is another example, but really - mini-monopolist
| power? It's one of countless lock manufacturers. You can buy
| Schlage, Kwikset, ABUS...
|
| In fact, no serious study of the construction industry pins cost
| increases on stuff like that. There are far more powerful factors
| at play. The laborers you hire want to be paid more than before
| (and the government is rising minimum wages). Compliance is
| getting costlier due to ever-evolving building codes,
| environmental and energy regulations, and zoning. Customer
| expectations are increasing (higher finish, more sqft). To the
| extent the materials are getting expensive, it's usually not your
| lumber mill being greedy.
|
| I don't expect every opinion piece to offer irrefutable proofs,
| but there is really no effort to build a case for that claim at
| all.
|
| Plus, I think the article falls for the classic trap of "rising
| prices are not inflation, it's <something else I don't like>".
| reaperman wrote:
| The areas I _might_ agree with this for construction would be
| something like lumbermills - where we have plenty of timber
| available but there's a bottleneck of capital for mill capacity
| and they've been able to raise prices sharply in the past few
| years. Investors don't want to pay to build enough capacity to
| bring prices down because then only older paid-off mills would
| win a pricing war if there were any excess capacity.
| tomrod wrote:
| Economic theory asserts that where there is profit to be made
| you will find entrants. So unless something stops entrants
| for mills (ie funding availability) we should anticipate
| economic profits to decrease.
| nothercastle wrote:
| Eventually maybe but the Capitol investment is high and
| only a few firms are in the market place who are capable of
| playing. If they enter they expand they will decrease their
| own margins and that's generally not desirable. Why take
| risks if you don't have to and you can live out your tenure
| as ceo collect big bucks and Retire without any. Everyone
| wants to run their business slowly into the ground US steel
| and K-mart style
| pixl97 wrote:
| This here. We see this cycle quite often. Some economic
| crisis in a product hits and the price shoots up. Other
| entrants raise capital for the rather expensive factories
| required to make the product in its modern form. By the
| time the factories come on line, the entrenched interests
| fat with profits plunge prices very low and for some time
| driving out the new players and then you see prices rise
| back to higher levels and maintain that price.
|
| It seems to many people don't realize it's not about
| making and selling the product. It's about the
| economic/money game. It's not about selling a car, it's
| about being a bank giving financing. It's not about
| selling a retail product, it's about credit cards. It's
| not about refining mined products, it's about controlling
| the willingness to invest in the sector.
| creer wrote:
| Not saying it's wrong but that seems a strange. Around
| here there are still small mills - some with strange
| strategies where they will drive lumber large distances.
| Although they do specialize in this or that product. And
| seem profitable even though they are small. Meaning that
| the market can perhaps be entered with a small mill.
|
| But in many economic fields there are unstable states
| where all producers can be worried but happy not to
| expand and just raise prices - as long as nobody else
| expands. "Eventually" can be a long time.
| throwup238 wrote:
| It's not about the size of the mill, but the capital cost
| to build a new one. No one is willing to invest the
| capital in building new mills because the old ones can
| always undercut their prices and kill them long before
| they turn a profit. It's the economic equivalent of a
| prisoner's dilemma.
| creer wrote:
| That works against a large new entrant. No industry is
| going to lower their massive collective profit just to
| shoo away a small new entrant.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Lumbermills are a local industry since transportation is
| a very significant fraction of the final cost. No one is
| shipping wood from Oregon to a mill on the East coast to
| sell to a construction company in California, so every
| mill is very much sensitive to local competitors.
|
| Ironically it's the larger mills that are insensitive to
| this dynamic, since they supply huge national customers
| like the big box stores or export to international
| markets. If Home Depot or Lowes decide their suppliers
| need a new mill, they finance it and it gets built.
| creer wrote:
| This is what suprised me when I did a (very cursory) look
| in there. It seems some mills do ship back and forth
| quite a ways along the West Coast.
|
| And I don't know that Home Depot and Lowes have that much
| of the market. They are not the ones that serve large
| construction projects. But if they did, it would be
| enough of a long term market that they could influence
| prices by funding new mills in exchange for more say into
| the price, a share of any profit, both, whatever. If they
| had this capacity, they could solve this funding issue.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Investment capital for large projects is why the stock
| market was invented.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Everyone knows that a good reimplementation of CUDA will
| make them trillions but despite 15 years, no one has made
| anything even close to it.
|
| There's profit to be made and no entrants. How can we
| explain this? If your answer is "AMD et al tried" you
| aren't paying attention to just how pathetic and shallow
| their efforts have been and still are.
| cpgxiii wrote:
| Every GPU vendor knows that actually supporting a
| reimplementation of CUDA for their hardware immediately
| signs them up for two problems:
|
| 1. Protracted lawsuits with the (now) second-most-
| valuable company in the world. 2. Any significant
| customers being loudly reminded by Nvidia that the EULA
| for CUDA tools prohibits their use on non-Nvidia
| hardware.
|
| The problem is not the technical challenge of
| reimplementing the CUDA API or tools. The problem is the
| users want _CUDA_ , not something that looks and behaves
| like CUDA but requires them to load a different set of
| libraries.
| creer wrote:
| In addition to the other response (risks), the economy is
| not a stable homogeneous field. None of the economy is a
| stable homogeneous field. Instead it's a bunch of
| discrete individuals living their life and each focusing
| on just a few things.
|
| And this goes both ways. For a competitor to form
| requires one small team of founders who are insane enough
| (in a good way) to believe they should try it, and a
| funding source that's ready to take the gamble on/with
| them. So you might get a fantastically successful company
| "out of nowhere" (Amazon, say). Or you might get a field
| where nobody is at the moment on hand to try it. Or
| several do try it and fail silently and you never hear of
| them. They are individuals, not some mathematical
| process.
|
| See also, even "efficient market" does not refer to THAT.
| CPLX wrote:
| Unless there is market power and exploitation by
| monopolists.
|
| Which just so happens to be the overarching principal of
| Matt Stoller's life's work.
| bequanna wrote:
| In the long run, sure.
|
| But as the saying goes: in the long run we're all dead.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > is that it does very little to substantiate its core claim -
| that the reason the economy is broken are small monopolists-
| but-not-really-monopolists who are trying to fleece you
|
| It's Matt Stoller [0].
|
| He tends to write his substack (and formerly his blog at the
| OMI under New America) in a very pathos driven manner in order
| to change the conversation around anti-trust.
|
| He also seems to be trying to become a Republican Rohit Chopra
| (assuming Hawley climbs the ladder) and is competing with Oren
| Cass on that front.
|
| There is a need to rework antitrust to take into account
| digital platforms, but imo Matt Stoller's attempts only serve
| to undermine the conversation, given that these are very
| technical conversations that have a high legal bar to pass.
| Going all "bull in a China store" a la Lina Khan only leads to
| appeals and out of court settlements in favor of the
| defendants.
|
| Based on second-hand experience, now's the best time for M&A on
| that front - you're almost guaranteed to have the FTC fumble a
| case and settle out of court.
|
| [0] - https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/04/21/matt-
| stoll...
| ghaff wrote:
| >In fact, no serious study of the construction industry pins
| cost increases on stuff like that. There are far more powerful
| factors at play. The laborers you hire want to be paid more
| than before (and the government is rising minimum wages).
| Compliance is getting costlier due to ever-evolving building
| codes, environmental and energy regulations, and zoning.
| Customer expectations are increasing (higher finish, more
| sqft). To the extent the materials are getting expensive, it's
| usually not your lumber mill being greedy.
|
| In general, you're probably seeing some increased disparity
| between the cost of things that require some significant levels
| of labor--especially if skills are involved to any great degree
| --and those that can be dealt with mostly by "just" throwing
| capital at the problem.
|
| Over time I expect you'll see more automation, more self-
| service, and--yes--more just doing without of things that cost
| more to deliver than you can or want to pay for.
| notahacker wrote:
| yeah it's basically a longwinded way of saying "market power is
| a thing", and a clumsy one that kludges absolute monopoly
| rentiers like Verisign, companies reneging on partnerships and
| conventional _market leaders tend to put their prices up when
| their product is much more useful than the alternatives_ all
| into the same bracket.
|
| Market power obviously is a thing which affects pricing, but
| market power in BIM software doesn't have anywhere near as much
| to do with construction costs or everyday experience as fuel
| price increases or labour shortages.
| kiney wrote:
| There's a very simple reason why it does very little to
| substantiate its core claim: The claim is simply wrong and
| therefore can't be substantiated
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| so, you do not believe prices are inflating?
| WalterBright wrote:
| > the article falls for the classic trap of "rising prices are
| not inflation, it's <something else I don't like>".
|
| Inflation is a general price increase caused by an increase in
| the supply of money relative to the value of goods and services
| in the economy. It's simple supply & demand - more money
| chasing the same number of goods => general price increases.
| Inflation prices never going down is a clear indicator that
| this is the cause.
|
| A general price increase could be cause by something like
| supply chain disruptions. But when the disruption eases, the
| prices will go back down. (We see this in the cost of a gallon
| of gas over time.)
| neilwilson wrote:
| It's not quite that simple.
|
| If I give you a new PS20 note and you put it in a drawer then
| that won't cause prices to go up.
|
| It's not money supply that's the issue, it's money flow vs
| capacity to produce.
|
| There isn't a fixed amount of stuff and there certainly isn't
| a fixed speed at which money can change hands.
| mistermann wrote:
| I'd be surprised if there is a single person in this comment
| section who would not defend to the death the root cause of all
| of this: fake democracy.
|
| I used to hate Moloch, and hope for him to die, slowly. I've
| given up and switched sides: I now cheer him on, I may be his
| very biggest fan. You all deserve what you get, and I hope it
| gets even worse. I hope your enjoyment level on this planet
| reaches parity with that of the people of Palestine.
|
| PS: I am very sorry for being political, I will try really hard
| to improve. After all, none of this is really a big deal, I am
| personally doing quite nicely for myself thank you very much so
| why should I complain? It is not rational. I will try to be more
| rational.
|
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
|
| https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMr8FGyBL/
|
| https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMr8FgQeE/
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The fundamental problem all these examples are linked to is the
| rise of centralized power in the economy, and the antidote has
| been known for a long time, see this 1952 book by John Galbraith:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Capitalism
|
| > "...private decisions could and presumably would lead to the
| unhampered exploitation of the public, or of workers, farmers and
| others who are intrinsically weak as individuals. Such decisions
| would be a proper object of state interference or would soon so
| become."
|
| Economists like Michael Hudson (I'm a fan) repeatedly refer to
| the rentier class in this context, and a rentier system (wiki)
| can be described as one in which
|
| > "productive investments are largely lacking, the highest
| possible share of income is skimmed off from ground-rents, leases
| and rents and thus in many developing countries, rentier
| capitalism is an obstacle to economic development. A rentier is
| someone who earns income from capital without working. (wiki)"
|
| Note that if you take capital and use it in a different way, e.g.
| to build a factory in which you are actively involved in design
| and production, you are not a rentier, but rather an industrial
| capitalist (I think we can safely put Elon Musk in this category,
| and Warren Buffett in the rentier group, for example). For more
| on this notion:
|
| https://thebaffler.com/salvos/dilemmas-of-the-rentier-class
|
| There are several policies which undermine the power of the
| rentier class - antitrust in competetive industries is one, but
| equally important is the nationalization and state control of
| fundamental sectors that are non-competitive and thus fall under
| the natural monopoly heading - water, roads, ports, electrical
| grids, fiber optic networks, basic public health care and
| education, emergency services, etc. - basically the
| infrastructure that makes all other economic activity possible,
| and which the likes of Buffett - a noted utility investor - have
| had their fat fingers in for many decades.
|
| China has incorporated these concepts into its state capitalism
| model and that's why it is outperforming the USA and Europe when
| it comes to technological and economic development in almost all
| sectors, from solar panels to high speed rail to water projects,
| and now, chips. They're still behind in space tech, but that's
| really only due to the phenomenon of SpaceX.
| fallingknife wrote:
| The utility sector has a 10% profit margin. Hardly an example
| of a monopoly abusing its position. If utilities were
| nationalized the maximum possible gain is 10% and the potential
| loss is the unlimited capacity of the government to waste
| resources.
| nothercastle wrote:
| Not true the maximum losses a private utility can generate
| for the public are unlimited because the losses always get
| nationalized. The 10% margin is after C suite grift so it's
| likely more than 10% you can save. Plus if you are on the
| hook for losses might as well take the 10%
| fallingknife wrote:
| It will be paid out of tax money either way. To save me
| money the government would have to either:
|
| 1. run the operation at least 90% as cost effectively
|
| 2. be less likely to make major costly mistakes
|
| From my experience with government the probability of 1 is
| 0% and the probability of 2 is minimal. At least when PG&E
| caused those wildfires, their execs were fired and had to
| pay $100 million of their own personal money in damages.
| This doesn't happen when government employees screw up.
| They don't even lose their jobs.
| nothercastle wrote:
| The fact that they had 100 mil to pay speaks of the
| excesses salaries were paying them.
|
| PGE isn't really run any more efficiently than a
| government institution, at least with government there is
| some measure of transparency, though accountability is
| lacking for both situations.
|
| Capitalism doesn't drive efficiency when there is no
| competition, in fact the incentive for PGE is to drive up
| actual costs and then raise prices to maintain 10%. The
| more expensive and inefficient they are the larger the
| 10% bucket is.
| creer wrote:
| 10% profit margin says not much.
|
| Maximum 10% gain is not true for example because a contracted
| utility has little pressure to improve services, create new
| services, invent new energy processes, open or serve new
| markets. They can go with the generic political will and
| collect their garanteed 10%. Private enterprise wins or loses
| potentially big specifically by not doing that.
|
| Maximum 10% gain is also not true for example because there
| is little pressure to "do it right" from an economic outcome
| point of view (when to plan expansions, how to schedule
| maintenance). Skipping the extremely politically incorrect
| example.
|
| Maximum 10% gain is also not true for example because the
| current sector rarely has the opportunity to expand
| dramatically to support a dramatic new industry. (In that
| case, the gain would come from the new industry - AND the
| expanding utility sector) Even the Pacific North West did it
| the other way around: available surplus energy caused new
| industry to settle there.
| teeray wrote:
| My most recent instance of this is online ordering with Dunkin'
| Donuts. The app has no feedback to indicate what items are in
| stock, so it's possible to order things that can't be fulfilled.
| If you don't want their substitute, the store cannot cancel the
| order. You have to call an 800 number and plead your case. Sure,
| it's not a huge hardship, but it's another instance of making the
| cancellation path more difficult to frustrate people into writing
| off the order.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Dunkin's are franchises.
|
| What you're describing is an inventory cataloging issue caused
| by limited quality and inventory control from corporate over
| franchisees.
| GiorgioG wrote:
| Dunkin's are a franchise, but they're using Dunkin's
| hardware, software, etc. It's absolutely within their ability
| to track (and force franchisees to track) inventory. It's
| also within Dunkin Corp's ability to give stores the
| capability to provide refunds from the retail locations.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > It's absolutely within their ability to track (and force
| franchisees to track) inventory
|
| Depends on whether or not the franchisee has implemented
| inventory tracking correctly.
|
| > It's also within Dunkin Corp's ability to give stores the
| capability to provide refunds from the retail locations
|
| That's the franchisee's decision at that point. Dunkin's
| corporate was out of the loop in that transaction and as
| such is reticent.
|
| Dunkin's tends to hold its franchisees to a lower quality
| bar imo.
| teeray wrote:
| The comment was about stores not being empowered to cancel
| orders to the detriment of the customers, not about the
| reasons why that order was cancelled. The point stands if,
| say, the store was suddenly closed due to a burst pipe.
| Corporate is counting on there being enough friction in
| calling them on the phone to prevent people from doing it
| altogether.
| zo1 wrote:
| Screw franchises and franchising. That's the kind of business
| model we need to get rid of, because it's basically a
| "subsidiary" model that shields the parent company from
| liability.
|
| At the very least it complicates the dynamic. "Am I really
| hurting Dunkins or am I just ruining a small business owner
| that pays a crap ton of money to the franchise owner and
| mortgaged his house to open this little franchise of
| Dunkins".
| GiorgioG wrote:
| Dispute the charge with your bank - you did not get what you
| paid for, and it's not on you to chase them down and waste your
| time. If/when enough people do this, they'll get their shit
| together.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| This is basically a variation on tragedy of the commons. The
| solution is right there in front of everyone and "simply"
| requires everyone to do it coordinately. I've told this
| solution to numerous people, just log onto your bank website
| and click "dispute" and thats it you are done. Nope, they
| either don't believe me or are afraid of doing it because
| "banks". They continue to just allow crappy businesses to
| effectively steal their money or they waste time with a 45min
| customer service call.
|
| Its the same with many other things like simply boycotting an
| abusive business. People say starbucks is bad. All that is
| required to "destroy" starbucks is simply go to any of the
| dozens of local coffee shops that exist everywhere for a
| month instead. That would make the heads spin/roll at the
| C-level at starbucks but still no one does it.
| gruez wrote:
| >I've told this solution to numerous people, just log onto
| your bank website and click "dispute" and thats it you are
| done
|
| This depends heavily on your bank. I can see this working
| if you're using a neobank, but there's plenty of legacy
| banks that require you to call in, wait on hold, etc.
| lupire wrote:
| Why do you believe that people who think Starbucks is bad
| are the people who love Starbucks? The vast majority of
| people aren't coffee snobs.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Oh man... it was just a random example of a business
| people regularly slam publicly for bad behavior with tons
| of alternatives. Feel free to fill in a bad company of
| your choice but often people simply keep going back to
| the company that ripped them off even when its trivial to
| change was my point.
| CPLX wrote:
| Disputing with banks isn't particularly reliable. These
| larger companies have a script now for responding for one,
| and the other thing that happens is they'll kill your
| account and permanently ban you.
|
| Neither of those accomplishes the goal of being able to
| purchase the product or service _without being ripped off_.
| teeray wrote:
| > the other thing that happens is they'll kill your
| account and permanently ban you
|
| This practice really should be illegal. "I don't want to
| do business with you because I screwed up, you correctly
| called me on it, and I had to refund you." PERMABAN.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| You know that companies will eventually wise up and start
| taking _you_ to small claims court for trying to do this
| small time subversiveness. AI will make stuff like this
| possible, and individualized resistance like this can and
| will be snuffed out once and for all.
| portaouflop wrote:
| Why should you continue to be a customer with these
| companies in that case?
|
| Sounds like learned helplessness to me
| barlines wrote:
| Economic Termite is a useful new term and I do hope it becomes
| more popular.
|
| Some other examples that the author didn't cover:
|
| Payment processors: VISA/ Mastercard have near monopoly over
| transaction fees
|
| Digital Ads: Google & Facebook are the Economic Termites in that
| space.
|
| Cloud Service Providers: The ET's here are AWS and Azure!
|
| Text book publishers: Prices always ever go up as the publishers
| control the market tightly.
| immibis wrote:
| Americans will swear that Visa and Mastercard earn their
| transaction fees, but the EU simply mandated them much lower
| and they were suddenly much lower, and the cards still work
| here. You don't get rewards, but that's fine, because you're
| saving that money in fees.
| torpfactory wrote:
| I have a theory that one of the core problems is that American
| businesses just expect to make too much money. Everyone seems to
| be aiming for 30% gross margin or more, and then working to get
| monopoly power or regulatory capture in order to achieve that.
|
| When I work with businesses in China they sort of expect
| cutthroat competition and I'm sure they're not seeing 30%
| margins. Low a behold stuff is a lot cheaper there, beyond what
| you'd expect given the labor price difference.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Antitrust is different in China.
|
| State-Owned Enterprises and locally backed private
| conglomerates tend to help put downward price pressures on a
| lot of goods [0][1] plus there is a system of price ceilings
| depending on the commodity or product.
|
| Local subsidies and tax breaks also help with minimizing the
| upfront cost allowing for smaller margins being sustainable
| over a longer term.
|
| [0] - https://businesslawreview.uchicago.edu/print-
| archive/chinese...
|
| [1] - https://global.oup.com/academic/product/chinese-
| antitrust-ex...
| chii wrote:
| For a lot of commodity manufacturing stuffs (think screws,
| etc), it's actually true that china has a lot of internal
| competition which drives down costs.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| > I have a theory that one of the core problems is that
| American businesses just expect to make too much money.
|
| If you pay attention to certain board meetings, earnings calls,
| and so on, or if you had the opportunity to work for certain
| companies, you'll find people talking about the growth of
| growth, i.e. second order. It seems that the notion of
| sustainable growth is just gone. Corporations chasing lofty
| goals in absurdly short timeframes.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Its modern investing. People are selling options covered by
| their shares. Little movements from headlines can turn into
| big double digit percent gains on a position in a day due to
| the way options are priced.
| talkingtab wrote:
| I have an axe to grind, so let me be clear: I believe there is
| strong evidence that we have moved from something approaching a
| democracy to a corpocracy. I expect many people will tune this
| out, but here is the question, crucial one.
|
| Who Benefits?
|
| Do the laws that are passed benefit the common people or
| corporations? You figure it out. Please do not bother with the
| whole trickle down nonsense, unless you want to buy this bridge I
| have. And who can use the law? Can you afford a lawyer? Who can?
| The author says ".. I want my money back!" Good luck with that.
| If common people cannot enact laws to their benefit and cannot
| use the courts to their right wrongs, then we are not a
| democracy.
|
| The article states: "the last four administrations choosing to
| 'privatize' domain registration". So why did that happen? It
| happened because we allow corporations to pay for our elections.
| You want to be elected or get funding to stay there? Lobby, aka
| bribe.
|
| This is legal because the US Supreme Court in *Citizens United v.
| FEC* granted personhood to corporations. We have a situation
| where our "elected" officials owe there election to corporations.
|
| In case you think this analysis is far-fetched here is an article
| on the American Bar Association site:
| https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_r...
|
| The crucial issue, the emergency, is that these "termites" as the
| article calls them are now so pervasive that they threaten our
| society. Our government has decided to use the change in prices,
| inflation, as the crucial measure of well being. Their argument
| is that if the rate of change is low, there is no problem.
| However, wages are the major factor in the economic condition of
| common people. If common people cannot earn enough (low wages)
| enough to afford common costs of living we have a new term to add
| to 'enshitification', etc. It is 'enslavification'.
| palata wrote:
| I think that we see everywhere that we are reaching the end of
| a system. Everything has been pushed to its limits.
| gruez wrote:
| >This is legal because the US Supreme Court in _Citizens United
| v. FEC_ granted personhood to corporations.
|
| This is a misunderstanding of Citizens United v. FEC. From
| wikipedia
|
| >The court held 5-4 that the freedom of speech clause of the
| First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting
| independent expenditures for political campaigns by
| corporations, nonprofit organizations, labor unions, and other
| associations.
|
| It didn't grant "personhood to corporations". That was already
| a recognized concept centuries before.
| deskr wrote:
| I think this will definitely fuel the maker movement.
|
| Inevitably, some of those makers will start up a business. Small
| scale at first, but some might grow. I don't know if it'll grow
| into a real threat though.
|
| But I do know that most of MBA Termites I know don't give a damn
| if their current workplace tanks. As long they'll hit their bonus
| targets for the year, they are good.
|
| https://makercity.com/book/factoids/
| johnwatson11218 wrote:
| This is the time for AI assisted efforts to merge with open
| source to deliver alternatives to all these Big Company type
| proprietary software solutions. I have been thinking of what it
| would cost to create enterprise workflow and document management
| but based on nodejs. Perhaps targeting the business markets of a
| smaller country such as Pakistan could be a way to get real world
| feedback before larger markets are targeted. Need all the
| documentation translated into Pashto? There is now an app for
| that. Seriously - how hard would it be to recreate the 80% of
| features that Autodesk is actually used for? Just to get
| something that is "good enough", using AI to architect it, design
| the test suites, the integration suites etc?
| losthalo wrote:
| The problem is the cost to shift to a new product, not cost of
| the product.
| johnwatson11218 wrote:
| Not sure what you guys are trying to say here but I have
| seen, with my own eyes, large enterprise software systems
| that end up being so fragile it makes you laugh. The
| incumbents in this space make dinosaurs look like spring
| chickens by comparison.
|
| There are millions upon millions of dollars being spent on
| stupid, outdated software that simply does not work. The main
| thrust of my original comment was that - "you thought open
| source was impressive? wait until the rise of AI powered open
| source". I think the highly arcane world of enterprise
| software is similar to being a travel agent in the mid to
| late 90s.
| pixl97 wrote:
| And who is providing support when the file they create doesn't
| work?
|
| At the end of the day test and integration is a stupid huge
| amount of work. Moreso when you have one large company that
| controls the format and makes "little oopsies" that you have to
| figure out and fix.
| anonu wrote:
| Whatever happened to "your margin is my opportunity"?
| pseudalopex wrote:
| "Competition is for losers"
| pixl97 wrote:
| Massive amounts of capital required to join the market.
| Especially where you can't directly sale to the customer (and
| yes, this includes selling on Amazon).
| CPLX wrote:
| Anti-competitive pricing.
|
| This shouldn't really be confusing this is first hour first day
| stuff if you study how and why monopolies exist and can
| persist.
|
| Here's an instant example. Let's say I own every single gas
| station in your city, a thousand of them or so, and I charge
| 100% gross margins on gasoline. I do hundreds of millions of
| dollars in business.
|
| You want to open a gas station with lower margins and undercut
| me. You pick a good location and open it.
|
| Great, my location across the street can just sell below your
| cost unit you run out of money. Bye, see you later. Was that in
| your business plan? Where'd you get all that capital? What kind
| of return were they expecting, and how will you deliver it
| selling below cost for an indefinitely long period of time?
|
| Also where are you sourcing your gas? Maybe I have already
| locked up all the current deliveries given my buying power with
| the refinery. Also what happens when you find out that nobody
| will service your pumps because I've locked them all up too,
| and am paying more than you can afford. And you can't afford
| anything because you're selling every gallon at a loss.
| Meanwhile the last couple years of 100% margins have given me a
| giant pile of cash I can use to do all of these things.
|
| That's just a basic example. Sure yeah maybe you could somehow
| attack this market, with a bunch of capital, maybe there's like
| something you could do to compete with me.
|
| But you're an ambitious and aggressive entrepreneur and that is
| going to be a TON of work. Why not just, like, start a
| different business?
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| I used to work for a competitor to AutoDesk. Popular opinion was
| that we had, at least in a few key areas, a genuinely better
| product, but it was pretty discouraging trying to make headway
| against "but I already know Revit".
|
| Vendor lock-in in professional tools is an interesting topic.
| Sometimes it is active and malicious, but often it's just the
| natural tendency to keep using the tools you already know how to
| use.
| dindobre wrote:
| I feel like the gist of this could have been "rent seekers bad",
| something I'd strongly agree with. A non-trivial part of society
| is checked out of real work and milking others dry because of
| existing conditions or acquired leverage.
| tinnet wrote:
| I agree. It seems like an effort to criticize issues of late
| stage capitalism without sounding like a socialist.
|
| There's also strong overlaps with Varoufakis'
| "Technofeudalism", I.e. construction companies living in
| autodesks fiefdom.
| losthalo wrote:
| Has anyone done a real study on what value the financial
| industly adds?
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| removed due to obligatory disclosure liability
| CPLX wrote:
| > Despite the botfly score of an 83% LLM poorly auto-generated
| article
|
| Can you explain what this comment means?
|
| This article is the personal writing of Matt Stoller, the most
| prominent writer on issues of monopoly and anti-trust.
|
| What do you think it is?
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| removed due to obligatory disclosure liability
| CPLX wrote:
| And there's some reason I should believe the assessment of
| some random LLM algorithm is more reliable than my own in
| trusting that I am reading a guy who I've met and talked to
| a couple times, who writes in a specific style and responds
| to people on Twitter every day, speaks in public regularly,
| and has been a prominent blogger with a consistent level of
| output for about 20 years?
| theptip wrote:
| I do wonder if a better antitrust strategy would be to pursue a
| portfolio of actions against second- or third-tier companies like
| this; the current strategy of going up against Meta, Google,
| Apple is sound in terms of raw size of antitrust abuses going on,
| but they remain some of the most popular brands in the US and so
| it's often hard to show consumer harm.
|
| As a counterpoint, I suspect building momentum by actually
| winning a bunch of smaller cases for companies like Autodesk or
| Verisign where the average consumer doesn't have an opinion,
| could shift the Overton Window on the issue.
|
| I know you come into leadership positions at agencies like the
| FTC planning for only having 4 years, maybe the above is naive
| politically. Still, one can hope.
| CPLX wrote:
| The FTC is doing that too all the time now. For obvious reasons
| they don't draw the same headlines.
| adampencev wrote:
| Reading this as a European (Czechia) feels surreal. Every time a
| merger or an acquisition takes place, it has to get approved by
| the anti-monopoly bureau and it's not uncommon they deny it or
| request some changes to the ownership structure.
| palata wrote:
| The US don't (seriously) do antitrust, that's a problem indeed.
| smsm42 wrote:
| I am wondering about the Autodesk example. If they suck so much
| and the users hate them so much, why no competition have arisen?
| Are there some government induced barriers? We saw Microsoft has
| been an unassailable incumbent on browser market, OS market,
| personal computing market, etc. And yet, their perceived monopoly
| has been successfully attacked. It took big companies like Google
| and Apple and IBM, but it turned out not to be impossible. I'm
| sure some big companies wouldn't mind a chunk of CAD market - why
| it's not happening then?
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| That's what Warren Buffett calls "moat". These are the companies
| one should invest in.
| baxtr wrote:
| I learned this too late in life. You basically have 2 choices.
|
| Either you spend your time working for someone to increase the
| value of _their_ asset. You get paid a salary, sometimes a very
| decent one. This is what society trains you for.
|
| Or you own assets.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Is anyone interested in working together building a non profit to
| bid for and replace the Versign .com operational contract
| mentioned? Think Let's Encrypt for the domain registry.
| Animats wrote:
| Four.
|
| That's the magic number. There have to be four competitors of
| significant size before prices go down. There are both EU and US
| studies substantiating this. It's been seen in cellular phone
| networks, ISPs, drugstores, and banks. Drop below the threshold
| of four, and the magic happens. Prices go up, margins go up, and
| consumers lose.
|
| Four should be the basis of antitrust policy. Less than four, and
| there are two options - break up, or become a regulated public
| utility.
|
| Two or three isn't enough. Collusion happens. Explicitly or
| implicitly, price competition doesn't happen with only two or
| three players. Four seems to be enough that cartels usually break
| up on their own. Somebody won't play ball.
|
| Four.
| alexpetralia wrote:
| How about Uber vs. Lyft, for example? Do you think there is
| competitive pricing here?
| fire_lake wrote:
| - they compete with local taxi firms
|
| - they compete with other modes of transport
|
| - prices have risen substantially after the VC land grab
| tailed off
| WalterBright wrote:
| Prices have also risen substantially after the government
| began legislating driver pay.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| It's like there was never a business model there then.
| Well, in a first world country anyway.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| For my area in Los Angeles, it wasn't viable because
| everyone (or someone you know) has a car. a friend ride
| is much cheaper than an Uber.
|
| I only download the Uber app when I need to get to the
| airport and am leaving for weeks at a time. Any other
| time, I take myself, ask a friend, or even consider what
| remnants we have of public transportation (e.g. instead
| of taking a horribly expensive uber in/out of LAX, take a
| shuttle to some smaller area and then hitch a ride. can
| easily save 4x the cost for a $5 bus ride and maybe 30-45
| extra minutes)
| rblatz wrote:
| That seems like a lot of effort, planning, and time to
| save $20.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I sure wish they did more. My dang state passed Prop 22:
| https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_22,_App-
| Based...
|
| >App-Based Drivers as Contractors and Labor Policies
| Initiative (2020)
|
| Sad part is it wasn't even close. Guess capitalism still
| can buy votes, even ones that work against your best
| interests as a working class.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| ...when the government legislated pay is over $26 per
| hour. Plenty of business would see higher prices with
| business-specific pay legislation mandating pay
| substantially higher than minimum wage.
| gruez wrote:
| >That's the magic number. There have to be four competitors of
| significant size before prices go down. There are both EU and
| US studies substantiating this.
|
| source?
| Animats wrote:
| "Entry and Competition in Concentrated Markets" [1]
|
| This is a paper from 1991, from some economists at Stanford.
| They say the key number is between 3 and 5. This was a study
| of smaller businesses in small towns - doctors, dentists,
| druggists, plumbers, and tire dealers.
|
| "Competition Policy Brief (2021)" An EU study.[2] This is
| much more of a macro study.
|
| "How European Markets Became Free: A Study of Institutional
| Drift"[3] This one compares US and EU antitrust policy
| changes over time, especially for telecom and airlines.
|
| There's overall agreement that trouble begins below 5
| competitors.
|
| [1] https://www.its.caltech.edu/~mshum/gradio/papers/bresreis
| s_j...
|
| [2] https://competition-
| policy.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2021-12...
|
| [3] http://germangutierrezg.com/GutierrezPhilippon_Europe_202
| 0.p...
| o1o1o1 wrote:
| Can you please share some sources on this?
|
| I was thinking about this when I saw that UAE only has du and
| e& which both don't provide the best customer service to
| formulate it nicely and prices which they could not ask for if
| they had to compete with their EU counterparts.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Speaking generally, not to you specifically, it seems like a
| ton of people see the problems created by capitalism and decide
| the solution is _even more capitalism_.
|
| I don't think there's a magical number of competitors that
| fixes things. We see an interesting phenomenon in commercial
| landlords where we have a ton of players but they all use the
| same software [1], which creates an effective monopoly even
| though it's not a classical monopoly.
|
| The problems we see in so many sectors were accurately
| described in the 1800s by just analyzing the workers
| relationships to the means of production. Internet access is a
| textbook cexample. National ISPs should not exist. They are
| rent-seeking parasites. The best Internet is in places with
| municipal broadband.
|
| It's just not feasible or economical to have 4+ broadband
| networks being built in an area. [1]:
| https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r...
| WalterBright wrote:
| > It's just not feasible or economical to have 4+ broadband
| networks being built in an area
|
| Actually, it is. When telephone systems were invented, lots
| of telephone companies sprang up and ran wires everywhere.
| The barrier to this happening with broadband is regulation.
| Regulators work hard to ensure there is no broadband
| competition.
|
| > it seems like a ton of people see the problems created by
| capitalism and decide the solution is even more capitalism.
|
| I find that rather funny, as most people see the solution to
| failed government programs is expanding those programs.
| Anyone who wants to cut back such failures cannot get
| elected.
| lovich wrote:
| > When telephone systems were invented, lots of telephone
| companies sprang up and ran wires everywhere.
|
| They did and cities ended up looking like this
| http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--
| 91pqSjxr...
|
| There is not enough space to dedicate to electrical and
| internet wiring with a competition model like this. The
| physical space is a natural monopoly. What should be done
| is to treat the wiring as a utility but allow for unlimited
| competition on the actual service, which is how the UK
| operates their internet service iirc
| nitwit005 wrote:
| That sort of industry gets regulated because letting people
| build multiple incompatible networks is an extremely
| expensive thing to do.
|
| The railways often built incompatible tracks, signaling
| systems, and so forth, which was a problem nation's still
| struggle with.
|
| Power companies created incompatible systems. Japan is
| famous for running on two incompatible electrical grids to
| this day.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| How many more humans would be needed to support 4 of every
| company type?
| saulpw wrote:
| None, if each of the companies were 1/4 of the size.
| cjblomqvist wrote:
| Not necessarily true. Economies of scale is a thing.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| This. More, smaller companies mean more duplication and
| overhead which can manifest in higher prices. One of the
| biggest factors behind market consolidation and
| centralization is because it reduces duplication and
| overhead which can increase margins and might reduce
| prices.
|
| Merely increasing competition doesn't necessarily drive
| prices down.
| saulpw wrote:
| Up to a point. Beyond that point, "economies of scale"
| becomes "monopolies of scale". Which is Stoller's (and
| the OP's) point.
| primax wrote:
| The same amount.
|
| The 4 companies are competing for their share of the existing
| business
| User23 wrote:
| How then do you explain the Silicon Valley wage price fixing
| scandal? There were more than four players there.
| boringg wrote:
| Cant wait for somehow the government to require four companies
| in order to ensure good competition by some well intentioned
| poorly reasoned and executed policies.
| roenxi wrote:
| > Four should be the basis of antitrust policy. Less than four,
| and there are two options - break up, or become a regulated
| public utility.
|
| 3 options; usually monopolies are matched by regulatory
| constraints making competition expensive. Removing the barriers
| to other firms entering the market is always an option.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I'm not sure of many, if any, monopolies where regulatory
| constraints are the cause. Especially compared to causes like
| network effects. Do you have a modern example?
|
| I can think of a couple of examples where regulations exist
| to manage other constraints on competition, like the FCC
| regulating the spectrum. But not where the regulations cause
| the number of major competitors to decrease dramatically.
| berniedurfee wrote:
| They forgot Adobe. Oh, and Protools. And I'm sure many others.
| adzm wrote:
| Protools has plenty of competition in my experience.
| berniedurfee wrote:
| Not in pro-studios. Most are stuck in Protools forever due to
| lack of interoperability with other software.
|
| You can run anything you want, until you need to send a
| session to another studio and they only use Protools.
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