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Oligopoly Everywhere
- rogers18445 4y agoIt feels like a tautology. Of course people with power are going to concentrate it and nudge things to ever greater heights in their favor. To attempt to stop it you need other people with power to do something, at which point they will want to do the same. The only 'solution' is for everyone to be equally poor, because wealth will never be distributed evenly. Those that generate wealth will not stand to lose it, and they have the options to make sure it doesn't happen.
- 082349872349872 4y agoAnother solution is to prevent any given period's oligopolies from ossifying. A "new deal" of the cards, so to speak. (In tech we are relatively lucky that people's careers tend to be longer than the relevant oligopolies)
- scarface74 4y agoMicrosoft was the most valuable company in the US in 2000. It still is in the top 5. Its personal computing operating system has had a 80%+ market share since at least the early 90s.
- tastyfreeze 4y agoOssified oligopolies are often the result of government regulation making competition difficult. There needs to be an easy path for competition to rise alongside large companies. Large corps need to be allowed to fail when they make mistakes as well. No bailouts. No special treatment. The tricky part is special treatment isn't always obvious. High minimum wage, insurance requirements and regulatory compliance are all things that are easy for large corps to follow but very costly for cash strapped startups. Often it is the large corps asking for more rules which is a ladder pull of sorts. There are many businesses that just haven't started because they don't pencil out with the high cost of compliance.
- DesiLurker 4y agoOne near effortless solution is to oss-ify the code & IP of the failing startups (instead of selling it to patent trolls for pennies on dollars anyways). this way oss community moves forward and nextgen startups have something to build off of. at the very least it should help with some rentseeking via basic IP or slowly cutting features and moving them to higher revenue products. this could be done tomorrow with almost no effort if VCs want with early stage startups. Really its a shame to see some good startups fail but their IP locked up behind legal red tape for ever.
- jorvi 4y agoThe insidious is that even if you somehow created a 100% inheritance / wealth transfer tax (that is, children would inherit virtually nothing from their parents), people with wealth would just rely on creating exclusive networks that the have-nots would not be able to join. Now that I think of it, sort of like the patricians and plebeians of Ancient Rome. You could become fabulously wealthy as a plebeian, but you would never be able to become (and enter the network of) patricians.
- mach1ne 4y agoLuckily our society is more complex than that, otherwise a single person would literally own everything. Looking at the world and our history, it’s not that there is any single optimal point where the trickle-up effect would somehow balance out; however, there does exist a point beyond which the probability for a revolution increases significantly. I don’t know if it’s the only historical circumstance where oligopolies collapsed, but it’s hard to find other examples.
- ryandrake 4y ago> Luckily our society is more complex than that, otherwise a single person would literally own everything. This is the natural end result of the system we are currently stuck with. It just takes time. Every year, we are inching closer to a world where one person owns everything. I don’t expect to see it in my lifetime or the next generation’s lifetime, but maybe within a century or two, if we continue down the track we are on.
- blooalien 4y agoThe push toward fewer and fewer owning "everything" puts humanity in a position where we're not really very likely to survive another century (or two) and even if we do, we probably won't be very "civilized" anymore. If ever it gets to a point where there's just one person in charge of everything then we'd best hope they're benevolent, fair, intelligent, and wise. The nature of human greed makes that highly unlikely.
- z3phyr 4y agoWealth is not the only variable, though people with wealth try to turn it into one. Can the richest person on earth in a free society, get a personal armed forces with the state of the art platforms directly under their control today? They will be unable to indulge in this aspect as a splurge, because their money is restricted.
- DubiousPusher 4y agoBarely. In the US, you can kit out quite a little army if you're so inclined.
- Beltalowda 4y ago> wealth will never be distributed evenly That is of course the other extreme end. Very few people want fully even distribution of wealth, just a reasonable and fair distribution. What exactly is "reasonable and fair" is a whole different discussion.
- DubiousPusher 4y agoThe funny thing is that when rhetoric is cooled, people have a really wide and strong agreement about what is "reasonable and fair".
- epgui 4y agoIt’s almost as if not everyone agrees on what the basic facts of the “current situation” is. People who are unsuccessful despite working hard and doing good work recognize the unfairness of the situation… And people who are successful tend to like believing that luck didn’t have that much to do with their success.
- beepbooptheory 4y agoI like your 'solution' :). Wealth as in "having a lot of money" is only as old as money itself. Most of human history has everybody being "poor" in that sense. I'm no primitivist, but there is something nice about the idea of removing the kind of wealth you can calculate with a calculator from the world. Hard to argue i think that it wouldn't be better, even if you don't think the logistics of it will work. It's a utopian thought we should certainly strive for though. What other beautiful future can one even imagine in the long term?
- DubiousPusher 4y agoBeing able to pile up money is kind of this intrinsicily weird thing. In the development of money it begins as this token to account for surplus. You bring more grain to the silo, you get more tokens. These tokens are exchangeable in the end for grain and that is that. In this way tOtherhe tokens represent a kind of debt. The silo owes you that amount of grain. People begin accepting the token in trade because they can exchange it for grain. It has become money But unlike our money, these tokens have some naturally occuring soft limits. There is only so much grain anyone will find value in at any given time. Therefore, the amount one could influence another individual with it had some limits. And the amouny of tokens one sloshed into "the market" quickly erroded their vakue. What this meant was, yes society owed you a debt of commodities but how much that debt waa transactable to different areas was limited and how much you could lean on it at any given time was limited as well. A well off plantation owner could work very hard, hit a lucky year and dump a ton of grain into the silo. The tokens he got from this would certainly buy him some influence. He could buy a lot of things certain goods would still be unavailable to him. He could pay a lot of bribes but a lot of people would only need so many grain tokens. This farmer contributed a value of surplua grain and the silo tokens can pay him back in many benefits but the further the dealings get from grain, the more limited his power. Ultimately the silo owes him a debt of grain. Our modern conceot of money obliterates those limits. A clerk at a desk earns the same tokens as a pastor or a soldier or a CEO. Those tokens are then convertible into anything no matter how disparate: food, housing, healthcare, etc. So instead of a commodity debt, owed by a silo, each worker earns a social debt. Effectively carried by all of us. Money is debt. This means that accomplishing something which leads to a high indebtedness in one area means society owes you a lot in all areas. Again, this seems normal to us but if we think about a distribution of goods that is proportional to the amount and kinds of work people do, it doesn't make much sense. Or at least it seems quite strange and prone to manipulation.
- kingkawn 4y agoAll Poor Together.
- psychoslave 4y agoThis doesn't get the point though, which is that the concentration is becoming heavier and is in acceleration. This clearly won't sustain forever. The article speaks about how it might finish in blood bath of the starving crowd decapiting anything presumably on the side of the rich. It doesn't speacks about a scenario of richest using drone army to make genocide of superfluous plebeans, or using more soft long term means like birth control, great assistance to euthanasia for those who are suffering extrem economical misery as sole alternative and so on. With great powers comes ability to make great atrocities. The article also fails to mention biodiversity collapse as it is being crushed by the human species oligopoly.
- BoiledCabbage 4y ago> Of course people with power are going to concentrate it and nudge things to ever greater heights in their favor. To attempt to stop it you need other people with power to do something... This is true. However you got the following conclusion wrong. People with power will continue to concentrate it. The solution isn't to prevent people from gaining power (or wealth) - the solution is it have an opposite force always pushing to distribute power again. So in relative terms people with good ideas, or financial success can gain wealth or power relative to their peers as a reward for success, but the overall system must ensure that on absolute terms that power or success doesn't continuously consolidate and become to heavy. That is why antitrust, term limits, and yes progressive taxation are some of the most important things a society can do. Checks against power consolidation are the only ways to keep a society functioning with any sort of efficiency. It's the old school mario cart approach. Yes someone can win the race, but the system also says the further ahead you get, the more headwinds you face and the further behind you are, the more likely you get a tail wind. It's the same reason why sports leagues have hard salary caps and specifically draft picks are distributed in reverse order of success/performance. It's the only way to get actual competition. The same holds in business and society in general. Otherwise you end up with a monopoly or oligopoly stamping out competition. The only form of free-market competition is enforced free-market competition.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- melling 4y ago“For example, before 2000, only about 25% of top-grossing movies were sequels, spinoffs, and remakes. Now it’s usually over 75%.” It’s a tough pill to swallow but YOU are the problem. People spending lots of money to make movies, for example, want a high probability of making money. So, the movies that the audiences pay to see are what get made. Crappy news sources? Few people want to pay for news either.
- marcosdumay 4y agoAn usual top rated movie today costs easily 100 times more than in the 00's. It's no wonder people don't want risks, but the explanation isn't as simple as you are making it.
- syzarian 4y agoThere’s a percentage of people who will watch a movie with a plot they don’t particularly care for due to lack of better options. You discount that sometimes the market drives viewership by constricting choice. Some decide that a barely acceptable movie is better than no movie. Thus is one of the problems of oligopolies; the incentive isn’t for improvements but for what is barely acceptable.
- stepanhruda 4y agoAgreed - I have been doing the bare minimum by avoiding Marvel and Star Wars, but people simply seem to love franchises.
- SQueeeeeL 4y agoYOU are not the problem. The individual has ridiculously low power to influence corporate decisions. Individuals may desperately want high quality moving media, but those have lower expected value than "sure bets" of franchises. Art has become dictated by demands of MBAs and shareholders. Also look at FIFA World Cups right when they were formed versus now, same exact tournament and participants, but the modern has become completely filled with "value" through ads.
- TOMDM 4y ago
- _8j50 4y agoCheck out: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect The rich getting richer and having a lot of power and wealth is hardly anything new. They may manipulate a lot of things and take all the wealth but in a democracy they are still somewhat subject to the will and power of the masses which should balance that out. Much of the discrepancy here in my opinion is a reaction changes in population, education levels, globalaization, technology, major global events,etc... these things tilt that balance one way or the other. I don't accept tricke down economics but the fact that this is being talked about all the time plus gen-z gaining more power and influence and enduring a lot of major traumatic shared experiences, I'd say a shake up (or down?) is likely in the near future affecting the wealth and power distributions.
- mnd999 4y agoThey rich subvert the masses by taking control of the media and controlling the narrative. Democracy is a sham because there is so little access to good information on which to base one’s vote.
- g42gregory 4y agoI think it’s just the law of Nature and social interactions. People/companies/entities get into the positive or negative self-reinforcing cycles. Exact same thing happens under the Socialism/Communism. Dr. Jordan Peterson talks a lot about it. The real danger is when companies become monopolies. I think at this point, it’s the role of the government to break them up. Lately, the governments have been refusing to constrain the monopoly powers and that’s a big problem.
- micromacrofoot 4y agothe lobster guy?
- devonallie 4y agoWhy of course, lobsters have hierarchy and so a loaf of bread must be $27.
- RobLach 4y agoThere's a fundamental model as part of the equation here called the yard-sale model. This is a great explanation: https://pudding.cool/2022/12/yard-sale/ https://pudding.cool/2022/12/yard-sale/
- metadat 4y agoAlso discussed 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34091098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34091098 (325 points, 556 comments)
- qup 4y agoI've been thinking a thing similar to the closing paragraph for a while. I'm so thankful we have a variety of cultures and people and ways of life. I'm excited to learn things from all of them. This is a big experiment, and nobody figured out the best way to do things, yet.
- stepanhruda 4y agoThe two-party problem is directly caused by first past the post election system - I’d like to see data from other countries, my guess is party plurality is as strong as ever there.
- ianai 4y agoIt depends on the voting system in those countries. There’s a lot that hasn’t been mirrored in the newer democracies, too, like the Senate and Electoral College.
- Barrin92 4y ago>"Income inequality increased from 1910 to 1930, for example, then declined for forty years before beginning its most recent ascent" The reason is for that is simple, we lack wars. Ian Morris wrote a somewhat provocative book a few years ago called *War, What is it good for?", talking about the productive nature of war in increasing the capacity of states and populations. To take a very contemporary example, you can almost be certain Ukraine will come out of their current conflict less oligopolistic, more equal and more functional and capable than they were before. A little bit more like Israel, which also does not lack in the conflict department. That's problematic as a normative theory but evolutionary kind of obvious. If you want dynamism, you need to wipe the slate clean from time to time. That's usually a fairly violent process. Oligopoly is what happens in the abscence of that kind of disruption.
- onos 4y agoHistorians sometimes also argue that the constant wars between France and Britain played a role in the industrial revolution occurring there. Among other things, to finance the war Britain had to borrow money, and to get it they had to sign over more rights to individuals.
- bartart 4y agoI don't know that these are very good examples. The box office and newspapers have been declining for years. Companies like Apple of course have a higher revenue relative to US gdp because they can sell their products with ease to rich people all over the world, not just in the US. It is also completely unsurprising that the internet's most viewed websites is unchanging as the industry has matured, following the pattern of every industry since the industrial revolution. And the structure of US elections completely discourages third parties, and this is not a new thing. In Europe things are much more dynamic -- France's current president founded his own party and then won the presidency and legislature like a year later. It's also probably good that people are living closer together, ideally as densely as possible, from an environmental perspective.
- Glyptodon 4y agoI think having a solid safety net and healthcare not dependent on employment would free up a lot of people to deviate and risk more. Same thing with cheap housing. I think healthcare, safety net, and housing never get addressed because the oligarchs and private school scions know this on a subconscious level.
- bjornsing 4y agoYes. “Setting man free from men” is the way forward. Not pitchforks. Not socialism.
- spicyusername 4y ago> healthcare, safety net, and housing This is socialism.
- bjornsing 4y agoNo. Socialism is crab mentality, backed by violence. A socialist does not want people to feel safe and free. Quite the opposite.
- spicyusername 4y agoWhat a peculiar thing to say.
- greatgib 4y agoI think that this article could have added the example of the smartphone market with Google and Apple duopoly. It is not a monopoly as they are two, so I guess it is the main reason why no one has really acted so far, but both of them completely locked the market, resulting in a lot less freedom for users. Marketplace issues are a good example but there are a lot other low profile subjects. Back in the days of "mobile phones", there used to be a lot more of choice of different makers/system/features.
- godelski 4y agoI think there's a point the author almost makes here that's pretty important. > When there’s one rich guy in town and everybody else is starving, it doesn’t seem that crazy to go smash his windows and steal his food. But when there’s 50 rich guys in town, somehow the state of affairs seems fairer. A major problem we've had in the last century is population explosion. Since the 50's but the world population and US population (and many country's populations) have nearly tripled. All the metrics being discussed here are percentile based. But if we see a higher percentile based level of inequality (e.g. compared to the 20's in the early part of the post) we would have a higher number of disproportionately rich people. There's simply the possibility that with such a large population size that monopolies are more difficult than ever BUT the problems that monopolies exhibit (they aren't always bad, but they are bad because they leverage they are able to abuse) are also just as bad with oligopolies. It really comes down to a decentralization problem. They say money begets money, but that's true for almost every resource. Even Adam Smith was against these massive conglomerates. We've had a long history of monopoly busting (albeit often too late) but the problem at hand now is that it isn't so obvious anymore. There's no clear monopolies but we see collusion and all the effects as if monopolies existed. Do we really need to squabble when someone says "x is a monopoly" and there are other players in the field? People are just saying "x has a disproportionate amount of control over y industry and are abusing that power." I think we all need to think seriously about this because if we don't allow for a substantial amount of nuance in these conversations and don't work together (even if we disagree in part) then the problems we face will accelerate. A big reason this will accelerate is the Yard-Sale Model https://pudding.cool/2022/12/yard-sale/ https://pudding.cool/2022/12/yard-sale/