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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: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday November 14 2019, @03:06AM (2 children)
You get that's precisely why there are so few with so much, yeah? Because life is hard and people with mad life skills are rare as fuck.
Punching a clock will not get you there. It never has and it never will. Hard work will not get you there. Amazing ideas will not get you there. Ambition will not get you there. Being able to see how to get there will not get you there. It takes a combination of hard work, amazing ideas, ambition, and thoroughly understanding how to get from po to sick bling. Just staying in the middle class takes things a hell of a lot of people simply do not mentally possess. It has nothing to do with anyone trying to keep you down; it's all about you simply not having the ability to do any better.
There's nothing wrong with the above. That's just life being as life should be. Giving lots of people something they value is how you get rich. Giving a small to moderate amount of people something they value is how you get to be generic ownership class. Giving the previous two classes of people something they value is how you get middle class. Giving them what they barely value at all is how you stay a broke motherfucker for your whole life. You get what you put in according to its value not according to how hard it was for you.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday November 14 2019, @04:17AM (1 child)
Agreed. Your listed the necessary but your continuation show that you believe is sufficient.
Disagree.
To keep me down? No, I'm not that paranoid.
To keep many or anyone getting ahead? Yes, apart from the "play fair, may the best win" that's the other solution to the competition game**, an easier one once one gets enough clout.
And it does require sociopathic skills to take this path - "if I can't win on merit, then let's cripple the others that can". Unfortunately, after enough time in the competitive game, this becomes the only solution to stay ahead.
Don't tell me you believe in perpetual exponential growth in a limited world. Once most of the competitors got to the point in which the next competitive advantage can be obtained only at cost higher than the ability to extract profit (and the law of diminishing returns guarantees there is such a level), the fair play gets a boot and the "if winning means stepping on dead bodies, let's do it" sociopathy comes in.
This is one of the reasons why the big corporation of world started to behave the way they do.
Very much like the corruption and bureaucracy in other societal structures, the sociopathy necessary just to stay ahead in late stage capitalism is something that fits with "the fish rots from the head down" - if the CEO or the head of govt get no other option but to behave sociopathic, in a quite short time everybody in the hierarchy will behave the same.
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** see the Prisoner's Dilemma for a very simplified and limited analogy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday November 15 2019, @01:02AM
That is an issue once you get a significant market share, yes. It shouldn't be but it is once you enter Big Business. Short of that, the corporations really don't give a flying fuck about you because you're costing them less than lawyers and bribes would.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.