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I think the issue could be rooted in recent monetary policy rather than an inhrenent feature of the market itself. Artificially low interest rate environments

I think the issue could be rooted in recent monetary policy rather than an inhrenent feature of the market itself. Artificially low interest rate environments lead to a lot of money in the hands of investors, which due to inflation slowly loses purchasing power over time. However, with large reserves, they can easily afford to prop up a business model which persistantly spends more money on bringing "free" features to user while charging very little. Those businesses obviously outcompete any business which do not recieve such investment. However, as time goes on, those investments must eventually earn a return. Switching from a model which loses money every year to one which must profit every year is invariably going to affect the quality of the product. Especially in an environment where directly charging customers for your service would be a death sentence. In the absense of such cheap credit, however, a truly competitive environment could potentially emerge, where businesses must be sustanably profitable from the ground up. Esentially this would mean the last 15 or so years has been wasted time in pursuit of this goal, as false monetary signals were steering us in completely the wrong direction. Some of todays tech companies may survive the transition, but I believe that most will eventually be replaced by completely new ones. Unless we go back to a policy of lowering interest rates to near (or even below) 0%.

pjc50 3y ago
I remain infuriated that we had the confluence of: - huge amount of very cheap money - widespread availability of highly educated technologists - knowledge of the climate model .. and instead "collectively" ended up funding giveaway services to users and inflating the SF housing market rather than doing the climate Manhattan project. (High interest rates are bad for renewables, because buying a solar panel is effectively buying 20-30 years of electricity upfront, and therefore hugely dependent on cost of capital and discount rates)
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  We would expect electricity prices to also go up faster with higher interest rates so it should roughly cancel out.
- coldpie 3y ago
  Yeah. Climate change would be dirt cheap to solve if we actually bothered to do it. The famously expensive Georgia nuclear plant cost less than 75% of what Twitter did. Juicero flushed $120M straight down the toilet.
beepbooptheory 3y ago
Just don't understand how one could be convinced these days of the fundamental conceit that even a properly profitable company is necessarily going to provide good things for people downstream, or for society in general. What is the argument for that in general again? Because to me, if your not Twitter, your Wal Mart or Raytheon or BoA. If your not shittifying a platform you are pushing out small businesses from every town, price gouging government contracts for missiles, fooling elderly people with complicated financial instruments. I just can't really put together any argument at all, if am being honest, to justify the idea that companies with a self interest in profit will reliably help people or the world. It just does not at all feel rational, its like everyone in the world is dreaming.
- ssklash 3y ago
  A guy named Karl came to the exact same conclusions, in 1867.
- SantalBlush 3y ago
  >What is the argument for that in general again? Free-market types used to have some assumptions about how free markets are expected to work, then they would derive the result that a free market yields a net benefit to society from those assumptions. Now it is glaringly obvious that a free market can cause a net loss to society, but they still need to believe free markets are good. So they ignore the evidence, and instead of deriving the result from assumptions, they treat it as an axiom instead.
  - Jgrubb 3y ago
    Or, blame meddlesome government regulation as the problem, blocking a free market and instead having winners and losers chosen by the state. It’s an effective argument because it’s got some truth to it.
  - zeroonetwothree 3y ago
    Isn’t the whole argument in this thread that the government meddled in the economy by printing tons of money that then was used for questionable investments? How is that “free market”? IME 80% of criticisms of “free market” is actually a criticism of government policy (and then the same critics think that more of those policies are called for!)

pjc50 3y ago

I remain infuriated that we had the confluence of: - huge amount of very cheap money - widespread availability of highly educated technologists - knowledge of the climate model .. and instead "collectively" ended up funding giveaway services to users and inflating the SF housing market rather than doing the climate Manhattan project. (High interest rates are bad for renewables, because buying a solar panel is effectively buying 20-30 years of electricity upfront, and therefore hugely dependent on cost of capital and discount rates)

zeroonetwothree 3y ago
We would expect electricity prices to also go up faster with higher interest rates so it should roughly cancel out.
coldpie 3y ago
Yeah. Climate change would be dirt cheap to solve if we actually bothered to do it. The famously expensive Georgia nuclear plant cost less than 75% of what Twitter did. Juicero flushed $120M straight down the toilet.

beepbooptheory 3y ago

Just don't understand how one could be convinced these days of the fundamental conceit that even a properly profitable company is necessarily going to provide good things for people downstream, or for society in general. What is the argument for that in general again? Because to me, if your not Twitter, your Wal Mart or Raytheon or BoA. If your not shittifying a platform you are pushing out small businesses from every town, price gouging government contracts for missiles, fooling elderly people with complicated financial instruments. I just can't really put together any argument at all, if am being honest, to justify the idea that companies with a self interest in profit will reliably help people or the world. It just does not at all feel rational, its like everyone in the world is dreaming.

ssklash 3y ago
A guy named Karl came to the exact same conclusions, in 1867.
SantalBlush 3y ago
>What is the argument for that in general again? Free-market types used to have some assumptions about how free markets are expected to work, then they would derive the result that a free market yields a net benefit to society from those assumptions. Now it is glaringly obvious that a free market can cause a net loss to society, but they still need to believe free markets are good. So they ignore the evidence, and instead of deriving the result from assumptions, they treat it as an axiom instead.
- Jgrubb 3y ago
  Or, blame meddlesome government regulation as the problem, blocking a free market and instead having winners and losers chosen by the state. It’s an effective argument because it’s got some truth to it.
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  Isn’t the whole argument in this thread that the government meddled in the economy by printing tons of money that then was used for questionable investments? How is that “free market”? IME 80% of criticisms of “free market” is actually a criticism of government policy (and then the same critics think that more of those policies are called for!)