SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the what's-mine-is-mine-and-what's-yours-is-mine dept.
On 4 November 2019, Techcrunch published an interview with Thomas Philippon, author of the book The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets, where he discusses the diminution of competition in many US market sectors.
From the Techcrunch article:
Economist Thomas Philippon's new book, "The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets," went on sale this past week, highlighting the United States' failure to block the country's largest companies from inhibiting fair competition.
"The broad picture is that competition is good, but surprisingly fragile," he said. "In today's environment, the U.S. is moving from a place where it was at the forefront of having free markets that worked pretty well for most people to being a laggard in many industries."
Philippon's premise isn't exactly breaking news, but the interview and his book give some good background as to how we got where we are, and how other nations are addressing these issues more (in some cases, much more) effectively.
The deregulation of major U.S. industries like telecom and energy in the 1970s and 80s sparked competition that lowered consumer prices and drove product innovation between competitors. Europe, on the other hand, lagged behind with more expensive internet, phone plans, airline tickets, and more until around 2000 when a major reversal of this trend began. Strikingly, when the EU strengthened deregulation and antitrust efforts to open its markets to more competition, it was the U.S. that reversed course.
[...] Based on Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) data, the U.S. now has more regulations for opening a new business than every EU country except Greece and Poland — a complete reversal since 1998, when only the UK had fewer rules than the U.S. Per capita GDP growth in the EU outpaced that of the U.S. over 1999-2017. On a purchasing power parity basis, Americans have experienced a 7% increase in prices (relative to EU residents) for the same goods, due specifically to increased profit margins of companies with reduced competition.
The reason for this divergence? According to Philippon, corporate incumbents in the U.S. gained outsized political influence and have used it to a) smother potential antitrust reviews and b) implement regulations that inhibit startups from competing against them. As a result, the U.S. regulatory system prioritizes the interests of incumbents at the expense of free market competition, he says.
What say you, Soylentils? Is competition truly dead in many sectors of the economy, or are there ways to bring it back and keep it?
(Score: 5, Touché) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Tuesday November 12 2019, @01:18PM
We have the worst of both worlds, and neither your nor I nor any soylenti who is not lurking here from the command center of a government agency(+and we seeeee you...well not really but some likelihoods are just at over 100%), can even rationally hope to determine what kind of 'market' this is.
Silicon Valley is a show no one is really contesting as being a wild fantasy, how 'free' is the market in which Hooli and Pied Piper go about their day? To me it seems hopelessly restrictive and fraught with meaningless peril.
Then I also happen to have worked for 20 years in various companies, hardly any of which I have been able to determine how they even make money at all. Whether something is done or not, and when money is paid and when every penny counts, simply doesn't track reality. Money is spent generally where it is not needed by the truckload and places where things could really use an upgrade they languish and strict, authoritarian budgetary controls are imposed.
THEN on top of that, I am an artist who has just been working that day job to break into publishing and/or entertainment, and here I can tell you that this is not in any way a market. There is not a free market for music, screenplays, comedy or actors. Pornography resembles a free market maybe the most because of the numbers, but I have looked into it and this is not a free market any more than prostitution is.
Classic Soylent and general tech lore callback, consider The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Finding the bazaar nowadays is difficult and fraught with peril. It used to be, if you could hold it and judge its quality, you would know which sellers were good and who was selling something dodgy.
Well now the virtual world has expanded by x1000000 and the malls are closing down, if you don't live in one of a few major cities, most goods of anything out of the utmost ordinary have to be purchased over distance using virtual tools.
The virtual tools are leaning heavily towards cathedrals, like amzn. If you are profitable your product and model will be stolen. Like yeah underarmor makes good money but their knockoffs make just as much, and that money goes to thieves who are breaking the system. Apple has this problem, whatever they innovate, china takes and distributes in asia and africa but with much poorer quality.
In everything there is the real thing and the idea underneath it or behind it. The ideas can exist independently of matter or the universe. Math exists without us.
The primary marketplace is the one of ideas, and this is my primary concern, how freely ideas transverse society. I have spent most of my life watching this and I spent 10 years at least watching what happened to this one website you may have heard of called reddit. I watched a place that was a kindof free marketplace for ideas turn into one that is decidedly not, where the freedom of ideas is clearly more of a 'pirate signal' that makes it into the 'matrix' because of oversight or error. And now when I am at reddit that is what I am looking for, that is the fun, to see who has the guts to say the truth in a place where it is scary to do so? Or who is so upset that this is their scream out the window like the guy from Network?
Or I clock shills(also here which you may have noticed) to track what the oligarchs are trying to push, in the case of epstein, we can argue for sure over whether he killed himself or was murdered, there are literally hundreds of people who come out of the woodwork to deny any assertion that he may still be alive. At this pointl, my view of the world is predictive of things like this, only it almost always turns out fo be more crass and obvious.. This pattern tracks across the JFK assassination releases recently and 9/11. Oswald was in contact with the cia, the one charge that was most vociferously denied by hundreds of authorities and supposed journalists for decades.
And then you want to ask me about the free market. You want to talk about the free market. When I don't know if I can even state the most obvious facts without it somehow ruining my life because extremely powerful people have a long history of making the lives of their most effective critics impossible. Antoni Gramsci. Gary Webb. Michael Hastings. Michael Ruppert. James Padfield.
Right now in Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile there are violent revolutions underway that are turning those countries into dictatorships, using the fun and friendly place for friends to determine which children in high school for masked police to kidnap.
To this add intellectual property theft, monopolization, international finance, fiat currency, mainstreaming of monopolies, and any good intention in this world has very little chance of doing any good by the time it is through the ringer.
So that is a no, we do not have a free market, anyone who says so or that is a clown. This is a bullshit ponzi system enforced with guns and weapons of mass destruction, and the people with the most money and power should be held responsible for their handiwork, for which the rest of us can only take secondary responsibility.
thesesystemsarefailing.net (but especially this fake market and the sick cultural hegemony propping it up)
https://jmichaelhudson.net/my-memes/ [jmichaelhudson.net] (some new stuff up, check out the ones with green background)