5 ms·

> Thus is life. No, such is full-blown neoliberal capitalism, where the only thing that is considered worth optimizing for is profit. Once you accept that the

> Thus is life. No, such is full-blown neoliberal capitalism, where the only thing that is considered worth optimizing for is profit. Once you accept that there are other variables that deserve consideration and cannot just be abstracted by price and profit alone (most prominently customer and workforce satisfaction), other optimizations will come into play, which will reduce the amount of crap people have to deal with, and will ultimately lead for a better experience for everyone involved - except for the very few at the top, which are currently reaping all the profits.

dalbasal 5y ago
I really wish the term capitalism hadn't been invented. Maybe it was useful in the 1840s, but in my lifetime it always seems to yield a thin hand wavy way of looking at things... whether your pro or con. The mental equivalent of shouting to win an argument. Whatever your definition of capitalism, I'm sure you can find examples outside of it. There are an infinite number of variables besides profit. Profit isn't the only possible motive for such systems, and it only takes one. A system of people is a system of people, whether it is a church, company, municipality, whatever.
- einpoklum 5y ago
  > A system of people is a system of people, whether it is a church, company, municipality, whatever. Different systems of people behave very differently with different kinds of motivations, stimuli and sanctions, on the individual and collective level. And while there are many variables besides profit, it is money (and capital in particular) which enables most activities of a commercial corporation - not voluntary willingness to work or serve for some purpose; and it is Amazon's profit which the organization is designed to promote and maximize, over anything and everything else.
  - dalbasal 5y ago
    True, though I don't see the contradiction. There are similarities and differences, also within such categories. In almost all cases though, they're not going to be as motivated to pay as they are to receive payment. Take subscription antipatterns for example. Charities do this too. They both also create similar self deceptions to justify the more onerous examples. It's not even just about money, convenience is a pretty big motivator. Again, I'm not saying that everything is the same, or being reductive. Quite the opposite. I'm saying that reducing everything to "capitalism," "greed" or whatever is meaningless. It's just normally the case, that people and groups are more cognizant of their own goals and wants than they are of others'. Altruism exists, but it's not uniformly distributed across everything an altruist does.
aristophenes 5y ago
The main thing to watch out for is monopolies. If customers always have enough choice then the customer and workforce satisfaction will get sorted out eventually, as those organizations will be selected for and companies won’t be able to exist without doing that right. It works really well, and is actually a strength of our free markets. Governments and committees stepping in and trying to fix the system tends to make it worse because the people who fall through the cracks have no recourse, and they also inadvertently create monopolies by making the system more complicated and expensive for new entrants. For all the complaining, “neoliberal capitalism” has made it the best time to be alive there has ever been, and the remaining problems tend to be around choke points where there is some kind of monopoly power and proper competition is missing. Amazon is getting there. But even so, reading through these comments, there’s plenty of discussion of how Amazon is so much better than the previous experience of many people. Amazon got to where it is today because overall the customer experience is so much better. It has raised the standard to a new level, which we will happily now complain about until someone else figures out how to do it better.
- Shacklz 5y ago
  > For all the complaining, “neoliberal capitalism” has made it the best time to be alive there has ever been That really depends on your point of view. For the average person on HN, upper middle class income or above? Sure thing, 100% agreed. Especially in the US however, if you're not part of that group, it would have been better to live 40-something years ago. Yes, you did not have all those fancy devices and cool tools that we have nowadays, but neither did anyone else, irrelevant of income. > the remaining problems tend to be around choke points where there is some kind of monopoly power and proper competition is missing Irrelevant of whether this might be true for Amazon - what about health care? Telco? Public transport? Basic utilities like water, electricity? The US is a prime example on why "neoliberal capitalism" (at least if we're speaking about it in the Reagan/Clinton sense) is a complete and utter failure - it is the only developed country with a declining life expectancy, the richest country on earth with a sizeable amount of the population having multiple jobs and still living from paycheck to paycheck. Don't get me wrong, I get your point. But it is really important to try to take the perspective of those who are the losers of the system, and for those people the current time is _for sure_ not the best to be alive. They are so desperate, so disassociated from the current state of affairs that they're willing to listen to snake oil peddlers like Trump, that they're willing to storm the Capitol or at least look the other way when others do, to disparage Science in the face of a pandemic because the class of the educated has left them behind earlier already, so why not this time? > Amazon got to where it is today because overall the customer experience is so much better. Relative to what? Compared to the "old experience" of having to go to a physical store - sure. But that's a damn low bar; everyone who can write a webpage can beat that these days. Amazon got where it is today because they straight-up ate the market, but not by being the best, but by being the ones who had the capital to sink everyone else before they went belly-up themselves (for how long is Amazon actually turning a profit? Not that far back, I reckon). In short, they played the market instead of letting the market play. And that's exactly my main gripe with what I'm calling 'neoliberal capitalism' here: The way Amazon played is not a bug of the system, it's a feature. It will continue to happen, until regulators kick in and set boundaries that go beyond anything what we can call neoliberal capitalism. It might still be a 'free market', it still allows for competition, but most definitely not in the barely-regulated sense that the neoliberal capitalism envisions.

dalbasal 5y ago

I really wish the term capitalism hadn't been invented. Maybe it was useful in the 1840s, but in my lifetime it always seems to yield a thin hand wavy way of looking at things... whether your pro or con. The mental equivalent of shouting to win an argument. Whatever your definition of capitalism, I'm sure you can find examples outside of it. There are an infinite number of variables besides profit. Profit isn't the only possible motive for such systems, and it only takes one. A system of people is a system of people, whether it is a church, company, municipality, whatever.

einpoklum 5y ago
> A system of people is a system of people, whether it is a church, company, municipality, whatever. Different systems of people behave very differently with different kinds of motivations, stimuli and sanctions, on the individual and collective level. And while there are many variables besides profit, it is money (and capital in particular) which enables most activities of a commercial corporation - not voluntary willingness to work or serve for some purpose; and it is Amazon's profit which the organization is designed to promote and maximize, over anything and everything else.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  True, though I don't see the contradiction. There are similarities and differences, also within such categories. In almost all cases though, they're not going to be as motivated to pay as they are to receive payment. Take subscription antipatterns for example. Charities do this too. They both also create similar self deceptions to justify the more onerous examples. It's not even just about money, convenience is a pretty big motivator. Again, I'm not saying that everything is the same, or being reductive. Quite the opposite. I'm saying that reducing everything to "capitalism," "greed" or whatever is meaningless. It's just normally the case, that people and groups are more cognizant of their own goals and wants than they are of others'. Altruism exists, but it's not uniformly distributed across everything an altruist does.

aristophenes 5y ago

The main thing to watch out for is monopolies. If customers always have enough choice then the customer and workforce satisfaction will get sorted out eventually, as those organizations will be selected for and companies won’t be able to exist without doing that right. It works really well, and is actually a strength of our free markets. Governments and committees stepping in and trying to fix the system tends to make it worse because the people who fall through the cracks have no recourse, and they also inadvertently create monopolies by making the system more complicated and expensive for new entrants. For all the complaining, “neoliberal capitalism” has made it the best time to be alive there has ever been, and the remaining problems tend to be around choke points where there is some kind of monopoly power and proper competition is missing. Amazon is getting there. But even so, reading through these comments, there’s plenty of discussion of how Amazon is so much better than the previous experience of many people. Amazon got to where it is today because overall the customer experience is so much better. It has raised the standard to a new level, which we will happily now complain about until someone else figures out how to do it better.

Shacklz 5y ago
> For all the complaining, “neoliberal capitalism” has made it the best time to be alive there has ever been That really depends on your point of view. For the average person on HN, upper middle class income or above? Sure thing, 100% agreed. Especially in the US however, if you're not part of that group, it would have been better to live 40-something years ago. Yes, you did not have all those fancy devices and cool tools that we have nowadays, but neither did anyone else, irrelevant of income. > the remaining problems tend to be around choke points where there is some kind of monopoly power and proper competition is missing Irrelevant of whether this might be true for Amazon - what about health care? Telco? Public transport? Basic utilities like water, electricity? The US is a prime example on why "neoliberal capitalism" (at least if we're speaking about it in the Reagan/Clinton sense) is a complete and utter failure - it is the only developed country with a declining life expectancy, the richest country on earth with a sizeable amount of the population having multiple jobs and still living from paycheck to paycheck. Don't get me wrong, I get your point. But it is really important to try to take the perspective of those who are the losers of the system, and for those people the current time is _for sure_ not the best to be alive. They are so desperate, so disassociated from the current state of affairs that they're willing to listen to snake oil peddlers like Trump, that they're willing to storm the Capitol or at least look the other way when others do, to disparage Science in the face of a pandemic because the class of the educated has left them behind earlier already, so why not this time? > Amazon got to where it is today because overall the customer experience is so much better. Relative to what? Compared to the "old experience" of having to go to a physical store - sure. But that's a damn low bar; everyone who can write a webpage can beat that these days. Amazon got where it is today because they straight-up ate the market, but not by being the best, but by being the ones who had the capital to sink everyone else before they went belly-up themselves (for how long is Amazon actually turning a profit? Not that far back, I reckon). In short, they played the market instead of letting the market play. And that's exactly my main gripe with what I'm calling 'neoliberal capitalism' here: The way Amazon played is not a bug of the system, it's a feature. It will continue to happen, until regulators kick in and set boundaries that go beyond anything what we can call neoliberal capitalism. It might still be a 'free market', it still allows for competition, but most definitely not in the barely-regulated sense that the neoliberal capitalism envisions.