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The WSJ, being the WSJ, phrases this as though long weekend nights chained to a desk should be the expectation, but in a wider sense, we're living through a goo

• piyh 4y ago
  Unlike the USSR, the US doesn't have state owned enterprises making up the majority of it's GDP. The companies that give a shit win markets.
  • rmk 4y ago
    I think the more relevant part is that people have realized that harder work does not necessarily pay better or lead to advancement. Companies can win markets while not paying their employees top dollar, and this fact is now clear to most if not all.
    • WalterBright 4y ago
      If your company's costs are significantly larger than your competitors, you aren't going to win markets. You're going bankrupt. > harder work does not necessarily pay better or lead to advancement Smarter work does, though.
      • DangitBobby 4y ago
        No, smarter work doesn't either. Increased productivity does not necessarily lead to better pay or advancement.
        • WalterBright 4y ago
          > Increased productivity does not necessarily lead to better pay or advancement In a free market, supply&demand set employee compensation at about 85% of the value the employee produces. The reason is simple. If the company overpays, the company goes bust. If the company underpays, his competitor will hire the person away. If you believe you're underpaid, make your case to your employer. If he agrees, good for you. If he doesn't, and you're not convinced, quit and work for his competitor.
          • BazookaMusic 4y ago
            Unless your industry is a monopoly because one company ate all the others and is actively sabotaging new competitors by buying them off before they can grow.
            • WalterBright 4y ago
              > is actively sabotaging new competitors by buying them off before they can grow The thing to do then is keep founding competitors and make a profit selling them to the "monopoly". P.S. buying a company is not "sabotaging" it. LOL
  • kelseyfrog 4y ago
    Companies answer to their shareholders first, their customers second, and their employee's third. When they give a shit, it's in that order. They reap what we sow.
    • zdragnar 4y ago
      It has been that way for a long time, though
    • streblo 4y ago
      Yes but ultimately they are answerable to an (often) diverse set of interests, which push them towards a maximum. State owned enterprises ala the USSR were answerable to far fewer interested parties.
      • Clent 4y ago
        What are these 'interested parties' because that sounds like another way to say 'shared holders' -- There is base assumption in such a claim that more is better and that our current system is more optimal than some other system you've heard about. A curious perspective; fear of options. Emotion over logic.
      • coliveira 4y ago
        The market is not "free" as they pretend to be. The US market is essentially the investment market, a small club of extremely powerful WallStreet companies that dominates the investment landscape. In this sense, it is very centrally controlled, if not by the government, but instead by a close elite of capital managers. A free market would be something like a farmers market where producers sell directly to consumers. Instead, the US stock market is more like a cartel where there is a central group of intermediaries, which control money moves between producers (companies) and buyers (small/medium investors).
        • WalterBright 4y ago
          > A free market would be something like a farmers market where producers sell directly to consumers. No, a free market is when people are free to make transactions with whoever they please. Big companies are just as free market as mom & pops.
  • dinosaurdynasty 4y ago
    How many US enterprises are monopolies or pseudo-monopolies?
    • coliveira 4y ago
      Pretty much anything of importance. Mom and pop businesses were destroyed in mass during the last 40 years. Now, practically only companies owned by the big capital have survived.
      • nxm 4y ago
        Thank globalization and increased standard of living in Asia for that
  • spaceman_2020 4y ago
    The markets have been detached from reality for quite a while. Cheap money has distorted market incentives completely. So who even gives a crap if you win this rigged game?
    • coliveira 4y ago
      The funny thing is that inflation has been rampant for decades. However, this inflation only manifested itself in stock prices and other financial assets, and for this reason it was seen as great news. Now the inflation is migrating first to house prices, then to commodities and every other aspect of our lives, and they start to complain!
      • BeFlatXIII 4y ago
        Inflation finally hit assets and commodities with real underlying value. Specifically, the kind of things normal people need.
  • marcosdumay 4y ago
    > Unlike the USSR, the US doesn't have state owned enterprises making up the majority of it's GDP. Hum... Are you sure? Keep in mind that state backed companies that are not allowed to fail create almost exactly the same problem.
    • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
      Pretty sure, yes. What companies are "not allowed to fail"? Boeing? Maybe some big banks? Maybe Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, Intel? All right, what fraction of GDP are they?
      • fbdab103 4y ago
        All major airlines. Food production (farming + processors + distribution). Banking. Rail distribution. If any of these encountered existential threats, I have no doubts that the government would step in citing (reasonable) national security concerns.
        • coliveira 4y ago
          Now add microchips and all kinds of technologies deemed to be of national interest. You also forgot the national auto industry that was bailed out from certain disaster in 2008.
        • therealdrag0 4y ago
          Existential threat is different than good old fashion competition tho. Our businesses are clearly no where close to USSR level folly and “pretend”.
        • KirillPanov 4y ago
          > Food production (farming You have obviously lived in cities your entire life. Farms fail all the time. Ask any banker at a branch in an agricultural area.
          • smolder 4y ago
  • jongjong 4y ago
    Although big corporations are not state owned, they are subsidized by government/reserve bank money printing. It makes no difference if the enterprises are 'state owned' or 'state backed'. Ultimately, the providers are selected by the state, not by consumers.
  • coliveira 4y ago
    US big companies are all backed by the government in one way or another. Friendly taxation, incentives, technology transfer, government contracts, tariffs on foreign companies. There is just a veneer of separation between government and private sector.
    • gnz11 4y ago
      Not to mention the corporate think tanks that write legislation. https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-paste-legislate/you-elected-them-to-write-new-laws-theyre-letting-corporations-do-it-instead/ https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-pas...
  • jiveturkey 4y ago
    the article isn’t written for the startup crowd, where what you say is largely true.
  • robocat 4y ago
    46% of the US GDP is government spending. Not so far from a majority that you can cast aspersions at other countries? Then again, my socialist New Zealand is trying to catch up with 42% ;). The figure given for Russia was 38%, which feels out of whack: who can trust GDP numbers eh? https://wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_government_spending_as_percentage_of_GDP https://wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_government_s...
    • reasonabl_human 4y ago
      Can someone explain the significance of this statistic in context? Seems there are many successfully economies with a government spend of higher % of GDP than the US. Not sure how this fits into a broader picture of a country’s financial health. Also- based on my cursory reading here, it seems disingenuous to claim 46% of GDP is government spending- the stat is that government spending is comparable to 46% of the GDP of that year. Government spend doesn’t comprise 46% of the GDP, rather we are using GDP as a measuring stick to evaluate the sanity of government spending amounts.
      • Mikeb85 4y ago
        It means 46% of GDP is government spending. Actually. Defense spending. Government workers. Infrastructure projects various governments partially or fully pay for. Subsidies. And so on.
        • reasonabl_human 4y ago
          Interesting- in that case these are some eye popping numbers. However, I’m struggling to square that fact with the observation that the Wikipedia table shows a number of entries >100%. How could government spending ever exceed 100% of GDP given it is counting toward GDP?
    • deltree7 4y ago
      2020/21 are the dumbest years to look at any government spending
• unity1001 4y ago
  > "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us" disease that we scoffed at in the Soviet Union That was after the arms race that Kennedy started to starve the USSR out of GDP succeeded, when the USSR was allocating all its GDP to defense instead of consumer industries. Which immediately stifled the extremely impactful consumer industry that the USSR had from 1950s to late 1960s. In that period, Kennedy admn. was quite concerned about the progress of the USSR, circulating internal memos saying how the USSR was able to raise the life standards of its people from desperation to 2nd world standards within the same generation, and at that rate other countries could start copying their development model. Ie, socialism. If this was not countered, the global economic control of the US that it gained in post-Ww2 environment would fell down like dominoes as nation after nation chose socialism and allied with the USSR. This was later called 'the Domino theory'. To prevent it, it was decided to 'make examples of' the countries that tried such 'independent development' (that's what they call socialism in their internal memos). That's where the Vietnam War originated from. Also all the other things including the blockade on Cuba etc. What relevance this has to the topic at hand is that, if the employees feel that they are actually receiving something out of the work they do and their lives are getting bettered in ANY way, they work. If there is no improvement regardless of how much they work, they just dont care anymore. That's the current situation in the US - any wage raise is immediately sucked out by the privatized critical services ranging from healthcare to food, from rent to education. Its just not worth putting in more effort anymore because the more effort you put into making money, the more the market sucks out of your wallet.
  • dragonwriter 4y ago
    > That was after the arms race that Kennedy started The nuclear arms race started immediately after WWII (or possibly during it), the space race (and associated missile race) started in the 1950s. The idea that Kennedy started “the arms race” is…ahistorical.
    • unity1001 4y ago
      > The nuclear arms race started immediately after WWII (or possibly during it), the space race (and associated missile race) started in the 1950s. Those weren't races. The decision to start an arms race and space race to starve the USSR of GDP is an explicitly laid out plan in Kennedy admn.'s internal memos.
• tw98521358 4y ago
  I would think most of the fortune 50 companies are on the government dole one way or another