8 ms·

Be Afraid of Economic 'Bigness'

122 points by arctux 8y ago

yuhong 8y ago
I am thinking deeper than that. I dislike the current debt-based economy for a reason. Google is a good example in which housing prices and other expenses increases every time the revenue increases.
- mtlevine0 8y ago
  Isn't this more an effect of supply and demand rather than access to credit?
  - yuhong 8y ago
    I am thinking of things like the ad bubble, for example when Google bought DoubleClick. Housing is a good example as it is a finite resourse.
    - antidesitter 8y ago
      > Housing is a good example as it is a finite resourse. as opposed to...?
cardamomo 8y ago
The sheer size and power of today's monopolies is mind-boggling to me. To think that the US has laws on the books to prevent this state of affairs but isn't enforcing them angers me.
- epberry 8y ago
  Agreed. FAANG has the government over a barrel.
  - porphyrogene 8y ago
    For many the rise of fascism being fostered in and around San Francisco is an impossible contradiction.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Think of all those FAANG engineers and startup founders who aren’t going to go quietly from their upper middle class incomes and RSUs/ISOs, regardless of the cost to society.
    - Spooky23 8y ago
      Why? In a police state, it’s good to be the police.
      - PavlovsCat 8y ago
        When I think of what I read of the Nazis, and my impressions of them, I would say nobody was "safe". The declaration of groups or individuals as enemies is on a whim, at least always reserves the right to be, and it never ends, that is the point. The more you have to offer to totalitarianism, the more reason to be coerced in all sorts of ways. Loyalty is not enough, even the most loyal must be broken on principle. In the end, one might end up doing stuff so loved ones don't get horribly tortured, while pretending to do it for X and Y reasons, but it won't really be for those reasons (anymore). And that will fester and eat at a person, some way or another. Even Stalin and Hitler both kinda ended like dogs. None of them were ever as happy and genuinely proud (by genuine I mean not in some alienated, hysterical, infantile way) as, say, Sophie Scholl, even though she was imprisoned and murdered. They did get the shitty end of the deal, in a sense. They could kill people, but that didn't make themselves more alive. And they were damaged long before they damaged anyone else, that goes with the territory. You don't even get to be a "police state cop", not a small time one, and not a leader, with intact humanity. > Hobbes was the true, though never fully recognized, philosopher of the bourgeoisie because he realized that acquisition of wealth conceived as a never-ending process can be guaranteed only by the seizure of political power, for the accumulating process must sooner or later force open all existing territorial limits. He foresaw that a society which had entered the path of never-ending acquisition had to engineer a dynamic political organization capable of a corresponding never-ending process of power generation. He even, through sheer force of imagination, was able to outline the main psychological traits of the new type of man who would fit into such a society and its tyrannical body politic. He foresaw the necessary idolatry of power itself by this new human type, that he would be flattered at being called a power-thirsty animal, although actually society would force him to surrender all his natural forces, his virtues and his vices, and would make him the poor meek little fellow who has not even the right to rise against tyranny, and who, far from striving for power, submits to any existing government and does not stir even when his best friend falls an innocent victim to an incomprehensible raison d'etat. > For a Commonwealth based on the accumulated and monopolized power of all its individual members necessarily leaves each person powerless, deprived of his natural and human capacities. It leaves him degraded into a cog in the power-accumulating machine, free to console himself with sublime thoughts about the ultimate destiny of this machine, which itself is constructed in such a way that it can devour the globe simply by following its own inherent law. -- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" > If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to "demand" its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant. -- Hannah Arendt, "The Life of the Mind: The Groundbreaking Investigation on How We Think" It's not that we don't have a good analysis. I would even say what needs to be done, at least on an individual level, kinda fits on a stamp, the trouble is that our courage and honesty do, too.
- neolefty 8y ago
  Wow, it looks like — even proportionally — the most profitable companies have grown since 1955 (the earliest year I can find ranked lists for). * 1955: GM makes $800M profit [1]; GNP is about $3 trillion [2] — GM's profit is 1/3750 of the overall US economy. * 2016: Apple makes $50B profit [3]; GNP is about $18 trillion [2] — Apple's profit is 1/360 of the US economy. I would be very curious how it looked in 1929! How much of the economy did, say, Rockefeller or Carnegie control? [1] http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_archive/profits/1955/ http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_arch... [2] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gross-national-product https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gross-national-pr... [3] http://fortune.com/2016/06/08/fortune-500-most-profitable-companies-2016/ http://fortune.com/2016/06/08/fortune-500-most-profitable-co...
  - danielvf 8y ago
    GM was selling cars mostly in the US, while more than 60% of Apple's sales happen outside the US. There's still quite difference, but a little smaller than the raw numbers.
  - adventured 8y ago
    Your comparison is drastically wrong. GM's profit in 1955 was a similar percentage vs US GDP, as what Apple is today. US GDP in 1955 was around $400 billion (it didn't reach $3t until the 1980s). GM's profit in 1955 exceeded $1 billion.[1] That produces a ratio very similar to Apple's today. That's despite immense global growth since 1955 giving Apple an enormous global market to play in. Most of GM's profit was derived from the US domestic market. If we went just by Apple's US profit today, their ratio would be slashed to closer to 1/1000. US GDP in 2018 will be roughly $20.5 trillion. Apple's ratio against that is about 1/360 (their profit will be closer to $57b-$60b for 2018 than $50b). [1] http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,807967,00.html http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,807967,...
- stickfigure 8y ago
  What exactly do you want the government to do about, say, Facebook? Split it up? Which half of your social network goes to which part? This idea of "government should do something!" just stokes outrage. It's not constructive. Propose something, and you'll find that the devil is in those details. Laws? Which laws? Apply them how? Those laws are not as clear or useful as you seem to think.
  - kopo 8y ago
    Don't show people their like counts or delay it. Provide noprocast settings like HN. That's all they have to do.
    - stickfigure 8y ago
      I'm... kinda bewildered by this. Honest questions: Do you think FB users want to have their like counts hidden or delayed? If yes - what evidence? And if no, are you saying that you want legislation that changes FB to work in a way that neither FB nor its users want? How do you justify that? Do you think noprocrast would change anything about Facebook? Would anyone use it? Can't you just make a chrome extension that does that and see if anyone is interested? For that matter, do you have evidence that a statistically significant part of the HN audience uses noprocrast?
      - skh 8y ago
        There are lots of cases where a significant portion of the populace wants something that is bad or is opposed to something that is good. Government is supposed to look out for the greater good. We can't just say that people want X so we ought to allow it. Similarly we can't just let government ban/endorse whatever it wants. I think it's clear that Facebook on the whole has detrimental effects on society. It does have benefits for people but it has very bad negative consequences for society. Therein is the conundrum. I have no solutions to the problem but also won't discount regulations on Facebook simply because people like certain features.
        8y ago
- profalseidol 8y ago
  Yep. Laws don't matter. Even in going to war, the US went ahead without approval of Congress. Or backing out of Nuclear treaties and building "missle shields" in Romania. What matter's is who is controlling production and how is this control is enforced.
olivermarks 8y ago
Despite Tim Wu's article fundamentally supporting the Anti-Merger Act of 1950, he fails to acknowledge that 'populist, nationalist' thinking is often precisely about supporting local communities and nation states over globalization and giant platform companies.
- srtjstjsj 8y ago
  "populist" is just a word people use when they don't understand why people care about something and don't bother trying to find out. "popular" = "what people I like want", "populist" = "what people I don't like want"
  - goldfeld 8y ago
    There may be something to your definition but populist is also plainly about the candidate who says whatever people want to hear, so yes it may overlap. As for GP's point, it may be the case for Trump but not so much for the newest populist in Brazil, for instance, who's more or less a sellout to the US of A and giant platform companies as many a breed of politician here down south have ever been.
  - rorykoehler 8y ago
    I always understood populist as bowing to the lowest common denominator rather than taking an actual moral position. Ie not thinking through the consequences.
    - liftbigweights 8y ago
      It seems you are just accepting the globalist media's caricature of nationalism without thinking about it more deeply. All nationalists take a moral position. That's what nationalism is. And all nationalists think through the consequences as well. Just like globalists do. Are you saying nationalists like washington, lincoln, gandhi, mandela, et al weren't taking a moral position or thinking of the consequences of their nationalism?
      - 8y ago
zaru27 8y ago
It seems like he's come up with a very dubious dumbing down of why Germany went to war and appropriated it for his own reasons. As an aside, it's interesting to watch how people on both sides of the aisle are jumping to find the rise of fascism in every nook and cranny of society. Sometimes, like here, it doesn't even seem to be an attempt at a political cudgel, which is the usual case. While I think most can agree FAANG is out of control, I'm not sure the fascism alarmism is a great approach.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
trevyn 8y ago
Being afraid would seem to serve the New York Times' interests, so I think I will go read Reuters instead. :)
imgabe 8y ago
I'm quite tired of the news telling me to be afraid of things. Could they try to sell papers (or attract eyeballs, or whatever) by actually providing relevant, factual, useful information instead of emotional manipulation?
- fromMars 8y ago
  Agree, it seems that people have their pet issues, around here, Facebook is bad, Google is evil, etc. Once we have these memes established we can blame things like extremism on them.
shmerl 8y ago
It's horrible how crippled and dysfunctional current anti-trust is. It lets through such monstrous consolidations that it can be considered almost non existent. And the worst are politicians who sell it as "free market deregulation".
seibelj 8y ago
I feel like the author started in his mind with “Problem: Business Too Big”, and then came up with “Reason Why: Big Business Created Hitler”. Business certainly was a tool used by Hitler, as was religion, the media, the train system, youth groups, and basically all institutions of society that as a totalitarian dictator he was able to control. Wu, as an antitrust legal scholar, certainly has an agenda. This article is fear mongering and playing to the NYT base.
ilaksh 8y ago
I don't think there's any good excuse that we don't enforce existing laws. But we seem not to be. If we can actually start to break into a new paradigm, personally I think that technology actually can help with these types of societal problems. For example, decentralized autonomous organizations via Ethereum could have some benefits over more traditional political structures. Banking concentration can potentially be mitigated by things like cryptocurrency. In terms of replacing the technology monopolies, decentralized technologies could provide common public platforms instead. For example take things like Mastodon instead of Facebook (which is federation, I believe P2P social could gain wider deployment).
harigov 8y ago
I don't think this is something that will be addressed anytime soon, no matter how important of a problem someone considers this to be. With large Chinese corporations in the competition, breaking companies into smaller companies isn't in the best interest of US (or so I believe).
masonic 8y ago
I couldn't find good market-share data for New York newspapers since 1950, but the New York Times sure doesn't fear its own "bigness" at the expense of past competitors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_newspapers_and_magazines#Defunct_newspapers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_newspape...

122 points by arctux 8y ago

I am thinking deeper than that. I dislike the current debt-based economy for a reason. Google is a good example in which housing prices and other expenses increases every time the revenue increases.

mtlevine0 8y ago
Isn't this more an effect of supply and demand rather than access to credit?
- yuhong 8y ago
  I am thinking of things like the ad bubble, for example when Google bought DoubleClick. Housing is a good example as it is a finite resourse.
  - antidesitter 8y ago
    > Housing is a good example as it is a finite resourse. as opposed to...?

cardamomo 8y ago

The sheer size and power of today's monopolies is mind-boggling to me. To think that the US has laws on the books to prevent this state of affairs but isn't enforcing them angers me.

epberry 8y ago
Agreed. FAANG has the government over a barrel.
- porphyrogene 8y ago
  For many the rise of fascism being fostered in and around San Francisco is an impossible contradiction.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Think of all those FAANG engineers and startup founders who aren’t going to go quietly from their upper middle class incomes and RSUs/ISOs, regardless of the cost to society.
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    Why? In a police state, it’s good to be the police.
    - PavlovsCat 8y ago
      When I think of what I read of the Nazis, and my impressions of them, I would say nobody was "safe". The declaration of groups or individuals as enemies is on a whim, at least always reserves the right to be, and it never ends, that is the point. The more you have to offer to totalitarianism, the more reason to be coerced in all sorts of ways. Loyalty is not enough, even the most loyal must be broken on principle. In the end, one might end up doing stuff so loved ones don't get horribly tortured, while pretending to do it for X and Y reasons, but it won't really be for those reasons (anymore). And that will fester and eat at a person, some way or another. Even Stalin and Hitler both kinda ended like dogs. None of them were ever as happy and genuinely proud (by genuine I mean not in some alienated, hysterical, infantile way) as, say, Sophie Scholl, even though she was imprisoned and murdered. They did get the shitty end of the deal, in a sense. They could kill people, but that didn't make themselves more alive. And they were damaged long before they damaged anyone else, that goes with the territory. You don't even get to be a "police state cop", not a small time one, and not a leader, with intact humanity. > Hobbes was the true, though never fully recognized, philosopher of the bourgeoisie because he realized that acquisition of wealth conceived as a never-ending process can be guaranteed only by the seizure of political power, for the accumulating process must sooner or later force open all existing territorial limits. He foresaw that a society which had entered the path of never-ending acquisition had to engineer a dynamic political organization capable of a corresponding never-ending process of power generation. He even, through sheer force of imagination, was able to outline the main psychological traits of the new type of man who would fit into such a society and its tyrannical body politic. He foresaw the necessary idolatry of power itself by this new human type, that he would be flattered at being called a power-thirsty animal, although actually society would force him to surrender all his natural forces, his virtues and his vices, and would make him the poor meek little fellow who has not even the right to rise against tyranny, and who, far from striving for power, submits to any existing government and does not stir even when his best friend falls an innocent victim to an incomprehensible raison d'etat. > For a Commonwealth based on the accumulated and monopolized power of all its individual members necessarily leaves each person powerless, deprived of his natural and human capacities. It leaves him degraded into a cog in the power-accumulating machine, free to console himself with sublime thoughts about the ultimate destiny of this machine, which itself is constructed in such a way that it can devour the globe simply by following its own inherent law. -- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" > If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to "demand" its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant. -- Hannah Arendt, "The Life of the Mind: The Groundbreaking Investigation on How We Think" It's not that we don't have a good analysis. I would even say what needs to be done, at least on an individual level, kinda fits on a stamp, the trouble is that our courage and honesty do, too.
neolefty 8y ago
Wow, it looks like — even proportionally — the most profitable companies have grown since 1955 (the earliest year I can find ranked lists for). * 1955: GM makes $800M profit [1]; GNP is about $3 trillion [2] — GM's profit is 1/3750 of the overall US economy. * 2016: Apple makes $50B profit [3]; GNP is about $18 trillion [2] — Apple's profit is 1/360 of the US economy. I would be very curious how it looked in 1929! How much of the economy did, say, Rockefeller or Carnegie control? [1] http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_archive/profits/1955/ http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_arch... [2] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gross-national-product https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gross-national-pr... [3] http://fortune.com/2016/06/08/fortune-500-most-profitable-companies-2016/ http://fortune.com/2016/06/08/fortune-500-most-profitable-co...
- danielvf 8y ago
  GM was selling cars mostly in the US, while more than 60% of Apple's sales happen outside the US. There's still quite difference, but a little smaller than the raw numbers.
- adventured 8y ago
  Your comparison is drastically wrong. GM's profit in 1955 was a similar percentage vs US GDP, as what Apple is today. US GDP in 1955 was around $400 billion (it didn't reach $3t until the 1980s). GM's profit in 1955 exceeded $1 billion.[1] That produces a ratio very similar to Apple's today. That's despite immense global growth since 1955 giving Apple an enormous global market to play in. Most of GM's profit was derived from the US domestic market. If we went just by Apple's US profit today, their ratio would be slashed to closer to 1/1000. US GDP in 2018 will be roughly $20.5 trillion. Apple's ratio against that is about 1/360 (their profit will be closer to $57b-$60b for 2018 than $50b). [1] http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,807967,00.html http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,807967,...
stickfigure 8y ago
What exactly do you want the government to do about, say, Facebook? Split it up? Which half of your social network goes to which part? This idea of "government should do something!" just stokes outrage. It's not constructive. Propose something, and you'll find that the devil is in those details. Laws? Which laws? Apply them how? Those laws are not as clear or useful as you seem to think.
- kopo 8y ago
  Don't show people their like counts or delay it. Provide noprocast settings like HN. That's all they have to do.
  - stickfigure 8y ago
    I'm... kinda bewildered by this. Honest questions: Do you think FB users want to have their like counts hidden or delayed? If yes - what evidence? And if no, are you saying that you want legislation that changes FB to work in a way that neither FB nor its users want? How do you justify that? Do you think noprocrast would change anything about Facebook? Would anyone use it? Can't you just make a chrome extension that does that and see if anyone is interested? For that matter, do you have evidence that a statistically significant part of the HN audience uses noprocrast?
    - skh 8y ago
      There are lots of cases where a significant portion of the populace wants something that is bad or is opposed to something that is good. Government is supposed to look out for the greater good. We can't just say that people want X so we ought to allow it. Similarly we can't just let government ban/endorse whatever it wants. I think it's clear that Facebook on the whole has detrimental effects on society. It does have benefits for people but it has very bad negative consequences for society. Therein is the conundrum. I have no solutions to the problem but also won't discount regulations on Facebook simply because people like certain features.
      - 8y ago
profalseidol 8y ago
Yep. Laws don't matter. Even in going to war, the US went ahead without approval of Congress. Or backing out of Nuclear treaties and building "missle shields" in Romania. What matter's is who is controlling production and how is this control is enforced.

olivermarks 8y ago

Despite Tim Wu's article fundamentally supporting the Anti-Merger Act of 1950, he fails to acknowledge that 'populist, nationalist' thinking is often precisely about supporting local communities and nation states over globalization and giant platform companies.

srtjstjsj 8y ago
"populist" is just a word people use when they don't understand why people care about something and don't bother trying to find out. "popular" = "what people I like want", "populist" = "what people I don't like want"
- goldfeld 8y ago
  There may be something to your definition but populist is also plainly about the candidate who says whatever people want to hear, so yes it may overlap. As for GP's point, it may be the case for Trump but not so much for the newest populist in Brazil, for instance, who's more or less a sellout to the US of A and giant platform companies as many a breed of politician here down south have ever been.
- rorykoehler 8y ago
  I always understood populist as bowing to the lowest common denominator rather than taking an actual moral position. Ie not thinking through the consequences.
  - liftbigweights 8y ago
    It seems you are just accepting the globalist media's caricature of nationalism without thinking about it more deeply. All nationalists take a moral position. That's what nationalism is. And all nationalists think through the consequences as well. Just like globalists do. Are you saying nationalists like washington, lincoln, gandhi, mandela, et al weren't taking a moral position or thinking of the consequences of their nationalism?
    - 8y ago

zaru27 8y ago

It seems like he's come up with a very dubious dumbing down of why Germany went to war and appropriated it for his own reasons. As an aside, it's interesting to watch how people on both sides of the aisle are jumping to find the rise of fascism in every nook and cranny of society. Sometimes, like here, it doesn't even seem to be an attempt at a political cudgel, which is the usual case. While I think most can agree FAANG is out of control, I'm not sure the fascism alarmism is a great approach.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

trevyn 8y ago

Being afraid would seem to serve the New York Times' interests, so I think I will go read Reuters instead. :)

imgabe 8y ago

I'm quite tired of the news telling me to be afraid of things. Could they try to sell papers (or attract eyeballs, or whatever) by actually providing relevant, factual, useful information instead of emotional manipulation?

fromMars 8y ago
Agree, it seems that people have their pet issues, around here, Facebook is bad, Google is evil, etc. Once we have these memes established we can blame things like extremism on them.

shmerl 8y ago

It's horrible how crippled and dysfunctional current anti-trust is. It lets through such monstrous consolidations that it can be considered almost non existent. And the worst are politicians who sell it as "free market deregulation".

seibelj 8y ago

I feel like the author started in his mind with “Problem: Business Too Big”, and then came up with “Reason Why: Big Business Created Hitler”. Business certainly was a tool used by Hitler, as was religion, the media, the train system, youth groups, and basically all institutions of society that as a totalitarian dictator he was able to control. Wu, as an antitrust legal scholar, certainly has an agenda. This article is fear mongering and playing to the NYT base.

ilaksh 8y ago

I don't think there's any good excuse that we don't enforce existing laws. But we seem not to be. If we can actually start to break into a new paradigm, personally I think that technology actually can help with these types of societal problems. For example, decentralized autonomous organizations via Ethereum could have some benefits over more traditional political structures. Banking concentration can potentially be mitigated by things like cryptocurrency. In terms of replacing the technology monopolies, decentralized technologies could provide common public platforms instead. For example take things like Mastodon instead of Facebook (which is federation, I believe P2P social could gain wider deployment).

harigov 8y ago

I don't think this is something that will be addressed anytime soon, no matter how important of a problem someone considers this to be. With large Chinese corporations in the competition, breaking companies into smaller companies isn't in the best interest of US (or so I believe).

masonic 8y ago

I couldn't find good market-share data for New York newspapers since 1950, but the New York Times sure doesn't fear its own "bigness" at the expense of past competitors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_newspapers_and_magazines#Defunct_newspapers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_newspape...