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I'm willing to bet Amazon gains a lot more value from society than society gains from Amazon.

prepend 6y ago
Let’s bet then. I think society gains more because of secondary effects that multiply up and down the supply chain. I think the difference is that the value for Amazon is focused on one company while the value for society is spread across 7 billion people.
- CJefferson 6y ago
  I think we might be using different definitions of words. In my mind, without 'society', there would be no police, no hospitals, no public education, no roads. In my mind, these are all part of what we get by being in a society. Amazon is welcome to try to function in countries with no functioning government, but I suspect they would have limited success.
  - prepend 6y ago
    I agree with you there in that Amazon needs society and government provided functions in order to operate. But I think that the main benefit of society is that it provides an environment that allows members to contribute and make it better. So while society provides safety, etc people and companies add to it with additional value. This value gets taxed (to support society) and the remaining value builds and compounds. So at a macro level any persisting organization contributes more to society than they gain or society would crumble. By definition the growth in society is driven by people making it better. And people work on stuff like corporations. On the micro level, it’s hard to figure out the exact net contribution from individual persons and companies, but Amazon is obviously a huge company paying out returns and the second order effects from how they’ve driven e-commerce, cloud, and logistics make me think they’ve helped many others beyond just customers and shareholders. That being said, maybe taxes should be changed. But they are currently paying everything required of them and monetarily generate lots of revenue for government (eg, corporate income taxes, sales tax, property tax, tariffs, capita gains paid by shareholders, and income tax paid by employees, etc)
  - unishark 6y ago
    Amazon's competitors get those benefits too, so they can't make profit from it. They have to cut their prices relative to what they'd charge in that hypothetical anarchy where they need to provide everything themselves in order to operate. For example they can use clean water provided by their city, so that may save them the price of producing clean water themselves. But the competition gets that city water too, so amazon can't profit from the savings of not cleaning water, or competition will undercut them. They have to pass the savings on to customers. The only benefits they can really profit from are things no one else can get, which generally only amount to corruption for anything I can think of. I'm sure there's some, of course.

Let’s bet then. I think society gains more because of secondary effects that multiply up and down the supply chain. I think the difference is that the value for Amazon is focused on one company while the value for society is spread across 7 billion people.

CJefferson 6y ago
I think we might be using different definitions of words. In my mind, without 'society', there would be no police, no hospitals, no public education, no roads. In my mind, these are all part of what we get by being in a society. Amazon is welcome to try to function in countries with no functioning government, but I suspect they would have limited success.
- prepend 6y ago
  I agree with you there in that Amazon needs society and government provided functions in order to operate. But I think that the main benefit of society is that it provides an environment that allows members to contribute and make it better. So while society provides safety, etc people and companies add to it with additional value. This value gets taxed (to support society) and the remaining value builds and compounds. So at a macro level any persisting organization contributes more to society than they gain or society would crumble. By definition the growth in society is driven by people making it better. And people work on stuff like corporations. On the micro level, it’s hard to figure out the exact net contribution from individual persons and companies, but Amazon is obviously a huge company paying out returns and the second order effects from how they’ve driven e-commerce, cloud, and logistics make me think they’ve helped many others beyond just customers and shareholders. That being said, maybe taxes should be changed. But they are currently paying everything required of them and monetarily generate lots of revenue for government (eg, corporate income taxes, sales tax, property tax, tariffs, capita gains paid by shareholders, and income tax paid by employees, etc)
- unishark 6y ago
  Amazon's competitors get those benefits too, so they can't make profit from it. They have to cut their prices relative to what they'd charge in that hypothetical anarchy where they need to provide everything themselves in order to operate. For example they can use clean water provided by their city, so that may save them the price of producing clean water themselves. But the competition gets that city water too, so amazon can't profit from the savings of not cleaning water, or competition will undercut them. They have to pass the savings on to customers. The only benefits they can really profit from are things no one else can get, which generally only amount to corruption for anything I can think of. I'm sure there's some, of course.