One thing this missed which almost certainly is contributing significantly to making us poorer is the “marketplace”ing of services. A lot of services that were

One thing this missed which almost certainly is contributing significantly to making us poorer is the “marketplace”ing of services. A lot of services that were discoverable either freely or through a small fee paid by the service provider now go through monopoly/monopsony marketplaces instead. Taxi services and food ordering are the best example of this. Every time I call a cab, 30% of the fee goes to a 3rd party whose only real service is becoming the de facto standard on which we operate (the actual tech is fairly simple). Same goes for all the food orders BG services like Grubhub. It’s a straight 30-40% tax that simply didn’t exist in the past and is paid only because a few companies used tens of billions of dollars of VC money to ensure they became the Defacto platform when the world transitioned from telephone to mobile apps to complete such transactions.