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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 eventuall

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.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  > 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 The majority of people making over $100k a year voted for Trump, and those numbers jump even higher if we look at race and income, where white people making over $100k were much more likely to vote for Trump. Similarly, look at the economic demographics of the people who were able to afford to travel to DC on or before January 6th, and the people who attacked the Capitol. I saw a lot of relatively wealthy business owners break into the Capitol, even some IT company owners.

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.

heavyset_go 5y ago
> 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 The majority of people making over $100k a year voted for Trump, and those numbers jump even higher if we look at race and income, where white people making over $100k were much more likely to vote for Trump. Similarly, look at the economic demographics of the people who were able to afford to travel to DC on or before January 6th, and the people who attacked the Capitol. I saw a lot of relatively wealthy business owners break into the Capitol, even some IT company owners.