3 ms·

I believe the root cause of ALL of this are extremely incumbent friendly policies that took hold in the last few decades in the developed countries.

js8 1y ago
The incumbent-friendly policies are also called laissez-faire. Turns out, the nature favors the incumbent.
- windowshopping 1y ago
  And yet invasive species flourish all the time.
- ch4s3 1y ago
  Large companies generally ask for and build a moat with regulations.
- GodelNumbering 1y ago
  No, the nature favors the fittest. The incumbent may or may not be the fittest. The said policies allow the unfit or inefficient businesses to stay around or dominate. While I acknowledge your point of view, a Tesla taking in $38B of government subsidy or a google/apple getting special lenient legal treatment is not laissez-faire.
  - Calavar 1y ago
    Fittest is a question of global optimum. Nature favors local optima.
    - echelon 1y ago
      An invasive species (ie. Google, Amazon, and Apple) can out-compete and starve out an entire ecosystem. Like invasive lionfish, which have no natural enemies in the Florida Keys. Big tech has destroyed the open web. Big tech killed the bookstore. Big tech is now destroying Hollywood. Big tech is becoming your grocery store and primary care. They're guardians that keep small companies from growing big. They can buy them out or threaten to pour billions into out-competing. They're growing into markets they never should have been in, then snuffing out the incumbents. They're making it impossible for new businesses to enter after them. (You try to build a smartphone. There can be only two.) Now they're putting price pressure on employees. They're limiting the upside for entrepreneurs and VC firms. They have all the cards, and they tax us and behave like capricious gods. I'm a capitalist. I think competition is good. But what we have right now isn't a fair playing field. Big tech needs to be broken up to restore the forest to growth. Thankfully YC and a16z are starting to feel the same way and are issuing statements about this rampant, wanton monopolization.
      - mgh2 1y ago
        It is based on performance too - it may seem that investment is fueling this for now, but at any time if their profits stop, so does the funding.
      - js8 1y ago
        If you want a level playing field for competition, you need some mechanism that will level it. Whatever that is, clearly not laissez-faire. (I would also say that capitalism is more than a competition of firms, in fact, private ownership of capital is by its nature anti-competitive for citizens.)
        echelon 1y ago
        Capitalism with strong antitrust enforcement should do the trick. We've been asleep at the wheel for the better part of a quarter century. We need to dust the rule book off and get back to work.
        umbra07 1y ago
        Bailing out large corporations and heavy regulations are not laissez-faire capitalism. We haven't had laissez-faire capitalism for at least a quarter decade (I don't know enough about late 20th-century economics to hold an opinion there).
        toofy 1y ago
        If the tech industry and the wider "disrupting" industries haven't been laissez-faire since the 90s then what on earth do you consider laissez-faire? Governments around the world have let these industries do whatever they want with almost zero oversight and almost zero repercussions for anything. For decades. These companies and industries do whatever they want. Its only in the last few years that a couple of governments have finally started to push back a teeny tiny bit.
        umbra07 1y ago
        Industries cannot be "laissez-faire". Economies, or systems of governance, can be laissez-faire. > Governments around the world have let these industries do whatever they want with almost zero oversight and almost zero repercussions for anything. For decades. These companies and industries do whatever they want. Its only in the last few years that a couple of governments have finally start push back a teeny tiny bit. Are you claiming that the tech industry wasn't bound by intellectual property laws until recently?
  - roenxi 1y ago
    Or the entire concept of 'too big to fail', which a great slogan for a terrible idea. If reverses the incentives from spreading risks and organising them to be uncorrelated out to instead concentrating them and encouraging them to correlate because then when it looks like a company might lose money the public will probably pick up the bill.
  - robocat 1y ago
    > No, the nature favors the fittest Actually nature favours selfish reproduction. Take care not to be distracted by "fitness" when looking at evolution. Fitness is only defined by reproductive success. Businesses compete for resources. But they don't reproduce, so comparing nature to businesses is often pointless.
  - js8 1y ago
    I think many replies understood my comment as "every incumbent-friendly policy is laissez-faire", and argued that. What I really meant was the opposite implication, "laissez-faire policies are incumbent-friendly". (The "another name" quip came from how it's sold to the public.) Re fitness - if you define it in terms of survival, you get a circular argument. Is a brainworm that controls the host (e.g. to get some subsidies) the fittest? Based on your example, you think it's not. So how do you define fitness? What I am saying is different - incumbent has an advantage, it already adapted at least once to it's environment. That gives it an edge over something that is adapting for the first time. Of course that doesn't mean incumbent cannot fail at readaptation or the new thing cannot win. The favor from gods has limits. (Incumbent also has a way to mobilize resources in a way that can be difficult for a newcomer. As was also pointed out, applying biological theories to businesses can be tricky, so this is perhaps more relevant.)
    - anonym29 1y ago
      You might want to revise your original post's wording, which quite directly implies that the incumbent-friendly policies that emerged in the last few decades, specifically, are laissez-faire. Your original post is responding to a post critiquing incumbent-friendly policies that only emerged in the last few decades. Your point that market economics alone can favor incumbents isn't wrong, but that's a non-sequitir response to the post you are responding to. Market economics aren't the incumbent-friendly policies that only emerged in the last few decades. The artificial mechanisms instituted through purchased political influence are.
      - js8 1y ago
        I don't think my post is a non-sequitur. Politicians and thinktanks (and rich incumbents) are still selling laissez-faire (free market) policies as the remedy for the direct incumbent-friendly policies. My point is, they are not the remedy. One example is the "abundance" framing from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
    - thaumasiotes 1y ago
      I like your comment, but I'm not sure about this part: > Is a brainworm that controls the host (e.g. to get some subsidies) the fittest? Based on your example, you think it's not. So how do you define fitness? The parent comment says (with my emphasis): >> a Tesla taking in $38B of government subsidy or a google/apple getting special lenient legal treatment is not laissez-faire. As you note, there is something of an assumption here that the claim being responded to is that all incumbent-friendly policies are laissez-faire. But there does not appear to be a claim that successfully seeking large subsidies isn't a type of corporate fitness.
- ekianjo 1y ago
  It's not laissez faire. It's lobbying (disguised corruption) at work.
- bigyabai 1y ago
  It doesn't really matter what nature likes or dislikes. If even one person is sufficiently corrupt, they can spoil it for incumbents and newcomers alike: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
- sanex 1y ago
  Bailouts for auto companies big banks and airlines, etc isn't laissez faire
  - AbstractH24 1y ago
    No, but the collateral damage in letting it all burn to the ground overnight is also a problem. The bailouts aren’t/weren’t problems. Failing to hold big companies and their leaders accountable for risks they took not paying off in a way that doesn’t disrupt low level people is.
    - sanex 1y ago
      Agree it's not great, and I still drive Chevy's, but laissez-faire capitalism isn't what's keeping a lot of these big legacy companies alive. Tech companies I think might be a different dynamic.
      - AbstractH24 1y ago
        I was thinking more banks and mortgages than car companies. But in both cases the concern is not just employees, but also direct and indirect investors. But agree, more needs to be done to force innovation and allow for things to “fail gradually” when they neglect to
- noitpmeder 1y ago
  Nature favors _survival_, at any cost
- anonym29 1y ago
  There is nothing laissez-faire about intelligence agencies bankrolling "private" startups that help said intelligence agencies circumvent the fourth amendment, nor about the regulatory capture resulting from revolving door between big business and the big government agencies tasked with regulating those businesses, nor about taxpayers bailing out banks or auto companies that made shitty investments or shitty cars, nor about the protectionism of the Jones Act that results in the US producing some of the world's most overpriced naval vessels at the expense of US consumers, nor about the open practice of corporate bribery of the legislature which the US calls "lobbying". The US does not practice laissez-faire capitalism; we practice a pernicious state corporatism where losses get socialized, gains are privatized, where the trillion dollar companies pay lower tax rates than the mom and pop shops, where the federal government spends more resources spying on their own citizens than they do spying on Russia or China, where members of Congress are for sale when they're not insider trading, but where you will get abducted by plainclothes DHS agents and get deported (even with a valid, legal residency) if you so much as dare to publicly criticize Israel or have the wrong skin color while standing outside of a Home Depot. There's nothing "natural" about any of this.
- keeganpoppen 1y ago
  uhhh in what world would that be called "laissez-faire"?

js8 1y ago

The incumbent-friendly policies are also called laissez-faire. Turns out, the nature favors the incumbent.

windowshopping 1y ago
And yet invasive species flourish all the time.
ch4s3 1y ago
Large companies generally ask for and build a moat with regulations.
GodelNumbering 1y ago
No, the nature favors the fittest. The incumbent may or may not be the fittest. The said policies allow the unfit or inefficient businesses to stay around or dominate. While I acknowledge your point of view, a Tesla taking in $38B of government subsidy or a google/apple getting special lenient legal treatment is not laissez-faire.
- Calavar 1y ago
  Fittest is a question of global optimum. Nature favors local optima.
  - echelon 1y ago
    An invasive species (ie. Google, Amazon, and Apple) can out-compete and starve out an entire ecosystem. Like invasive lionfish, which have no natural enemies in the Florida Keys. Big tech has destroyed the open web. Big tech killed the bookstore. Big tech is now destroying Hollywood. Big tech is becoming your grocery store and primary care. They're guardians that keep small companies from growing big. They can buy them out or threaten to pour billions into out-competing. They're growing into markets they never should have been in, then snuffing out the incumbents. They're making it impossible for new businesses to enter after them. (You try to build a smartphone. There can be only two.) Now they're putting price pressure on employees. They're limiting the upside for entrepreneurs and VC firms. They have all the cards, and they tax us and behave like capricious gods. I'm a capitalist. I think competition is good. But what we have right now isn't a fair playing field. Big tech needs to be broken up to restore the forest to growth. Thankfully YC and a16z are starting to feel the same way and are issuing statements about this rampant, wanton monopolization.
    - mgh2 1y ago
      It is based on performance too - it may seem that investment is fueling this for now, but at any time if their profits stop, so does the funding.
    - js8 1y ago
      If you want a level playing field for competition, you need some mechanism that will level it. Whatever that is, clearly not laissez-faire. (I would also say that capitalism is more than a competition of firms, in fact, private ownership of capital is by its nature anti-competitive for citizens.)
      - echelon 1y ago
        Capitalism with strong antitrust enforcement should do the trick. We've been asleep at the wheel for the better part of a quarter century. We need to dust the rule book off and get back to work.
      - umbra07 1y ago
        Bailing out large corporations and heavy regulations are not laissez-faire capitalism. We haven't had laissez-faire capitalism for at least a quarter decade (I don't know enough about late 20th-century economics to hold an opinion there).
        toofy 1y ago
        If the tech industry and the wider "disrupting" industries haven't been laissez-faire since the 90s then what on earth do you consider laissez-faire? Governments around the world have let these industries do whatever they want with almost zero oversight and almost zero repercussions for anything. For decades. These companies and industries do whatever they want. Its only in the last few years that a couple of governments have finally started to push back a teeny tiny bit.
        umbra07 1y ago
        Industries cannot be "laissez-faire". Economies, or systems of governance, can be laissez-faire. > Governments around the world have let these industries do whatever they want with almost zero oversight and almost zero repercussions for anything. For decades. These companies and industries do whatever they want. Its only in the last few years that a couple of governments have finally start push back a teeny tiny bit. Are you claiming that the tech industry wasn't bound by intellectual property laws until recently?
- roenxi 1y ago
  Or the entire concept of 'too big to fail', which a great slogan for a terrible idea. If reverses the incentives from spreading risks and organising them to be uncorrelated out to instead concentrating them and encouraging them to correlate because then when it looks like a company might lose money the public will probably pick up the bill.
- robocat 1y ago
  > No, the nature favors the fittest Actually nature favours selfish reproduction. Take care not to be distracted by "fitness" when looking at evolution. Fitness is only defined by reproductive success. Businesses compete for resources. But they don't reproduce, so comparing nature to businesses is often pointless.
- js8 1y ago
  I think many replies understood my comment as "every incumbent-friendly policy is laissez-faire", and argued that. What I really meant was the opposite implication, "laissez-faire policies are incumbent-friendly". (The "another name" quip came from how it's sold to the public.) Re fitness - if you define it in terms of survival, you get a circular argument. Is a brainworm that controls the host (e.g. to get some subsidies) the fittest? Based on your example, you think it's not. So how do you define fitness? What I am saying is different - incumbent has an advantage, it already adapted at least once to it's environment. That gives it an edge over something that is adapting for the first time. Of course that doesn't mean incumbent cannot fail at readaptation or the new thing cannot win. The favor from gods has limits. (Incumbent also has a way to mobilize resources in a way that can be difficult for a newcomer. As was also pointed out, applying biological theories to businesses can be tricky, so this is perhaps more relevant.)
  - anonym29 1y ago
    You might want to revise your original post's wording, which quite directly implies that the incumbent-friendly policies that emerged in the last few decades, specifically, are laissez-faire. Your original post is responding to a post critiquing incumbent-friendly policies that only emerged in the last few decades. Your point that market economics alone can favor incumbents isn't wrong, but that's a non-sequitir response to the post you are responding to. Market economics aren't the incumbent-friendly policies that only emerged in the last few decades. The artificial mechanisms instituted through purchased political influence are.
    - js8 1y ago
      I don't think my post is a non-sequitur. Politicians and thinktanks (and rich incumbents) are still selling laissez-faire (free market) policies as the remedy for the direct incumbent-friendly policies. My point is, they are not the remedy. One example is the "abundance" framing from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    I like your comment, but I'm not sure about this part: > Is a brainworm that controls the host (e.g. to get some subsidies) the fittest? Based on your example, you think it's not. So how do you define fitness? The parent comment says (with my emphasis): >> a Tesla taking in $38B of government subsidy or a google/apple getting special lenient legal treatment is not laissez-faire. As you note, there is something of an assumption here that the claim being responded to is that all incumbent-friendly policies are laissez-faire. But there does not appear to be a claim that successfully seeking large subsidies isn't a type of corporate fitness.
ekianjo 1y ago
It's not laissez faire. It's lobbying (disguised corruption) at work.
bigyabai 1y ago
It doesn't really matter what nature likes or dislikes. If even one person is sufficiently corrupt, they can spoil it for incumbents and newcomers alike: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
sanex 1y ago
Bailouts for auto companies big banks and airlines, etc isn't laissez faire
- AbstractH24 1y ago
  No, but the collateral damage in letting it all burn to the ground overnight is also a problem. The bailouts aren’t/weren’t problems. Failing to hold big companies and their leaders accountable for risks they took not paying off in a way that doesn’t disrupt low level people is.
  - sanex 1y ago
    Agree it's not great, and I still drive Chevy's, but laissez-faire capitalism isn't what's keeping a lot of these big legacy companies alive. Tech companies I think might be a different dynamic.
    - AbstractH24 1y ago
      I was thinking more banks and mortgages than car companies. But in both cases the concern is not just employees, but also direct and indirect investors. But agree, more needs to be done to force innovation and allow for things to “fail gradually” when they neglect to
noitpmeder 1y ago
Nature favors _survival_, at any cost
anonym29 1y ago
There is nothing laissez-faire about intelligence agencies bankrolling "private" startups that help said intelligence agencies circumvent the fourth amendment, nor about the regulatory capture resulting from revolving door between big business and the big government agencies tasked with regulating those businesses, nor about taxpayers bailing out banks or auto companies that made shitty investments or shitty cars, nor about the protectionism of the Jones Act that results in the US producing some of the world's most overpriced naval vessels at the expense of US consumers, nor about the open practice of corporate bribery of the legislature which the US calls "lobbying". The US does not practice laissez-faire capitalism; we practice a pernicious state corporatism where losses get socialized, gains are privatized, where the trillion dollar companies pay lower tax rates than the mom and pop shops, where the federal government spends more resources spying on their own citizens than they do spying on Russia or China, where members of Congress are for sale when they're not insider trading, but where you will get abducted by plainclothes DHS agents and get deported (even with a valid, legal residency) if you so much as dare to publicly criticize Israel or have the wrong skin color while standing outside of a Home Depot. There's nothing "natural" about any of this.
keeganpoppen 1y ago
uhhh in what world would that be called "laissez-faire"?