I'm not going to boost it because it's like 20 pages long, but @connor_dylan checked in last night after six months away from the fediverse and delivered a rant about competition w/r/t economics and the fact that everything we're taught about it is a l...
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I'm not going to boost it because it's like 20 pages long, but @connor_dylan checked in last night after six months away from the fediverse and delivered a rant about competition w/r/t economics and the fact that everything we're taught about it is a lie.
The Dismal Scientist (@[email protected])
I just wish I could go into people's brains and remove this fuckin idea that "competition" in the economic sense, or in any sense as far as I know, is both stable and pluralistic. When people think of "competition" they tend to think of "perfect competition" which if you've gone to highschool since like 1979, this is the trash you learned in school. That is not a real thing. There is nothing about competition that promotes or incentivizes pluralism. And not only does it not incentivize it, it actively incentivizes concentration and scale cause that's the best way to maximize profits. Its literally baked into the core of how every business understands profitability intuitively. The more hours a day you run your machine, and the more units you make and sell, the faster you pay off that piece of capital. The faster you pay it off, the faster you can add another piece of capital, and if you maximize your utilization of that capital you can buy another company that has a similar market and streamline your warehousing and distribution and bulk buy raw materials, and then you invest in R&D which-- It's just centrifugal. And the people who ride these waves aren't geniuses, most of seem kinda dumb honestly. You would really have to be self sabotaging to not ride this kind of economic gravity once it gets going. Look at 🅱️lock🅱️uster and their failure to pick up netflix when they should have. You have to be that inept to not ride the wave. Corporations are motivated by profit and the most profitable way to exist is as a monopoly and a monopsony, the only seller of goods and services and the only buyer of raw materials and labor. A corporation that achieves that has the highest possible profit, and can get higher than average profit margins from that position. There are things this doesn't apply to. Things that are craft and artisanal are desired for their distinction. In cases like that, they can't scale up without losing the thing that made them desirable. But in anything that involves mass production and logistics, there is an automatic concentration of market share because all the incentives drive firms to make that happen. We have to change the narrative about things that get large 🦣 in this sense. Take Amazon. Amazon proves that merging online retail into essentially one space draws in a ton of shoppers because the variety of products in one place creates a clustering effect. And clustering isn't some Marxist conspiracy, that's one of the few valid concepts in the textbooks I'm shitting on here. Like DUH. no fuckin SHIT people figure out which market has the most options and go there first. Why do we have to act like Jeff bezos is a visionary over this shit. When you see it this way, you realize what a 🤡 take breaking up companies is in the big picture. What would we break Amazon up into at this point? Break it laterally like they did Ma Bell? Break it up into it's parts which would all then immediately be compelled to merge in their own spaces? The scale, which in this case is having most of the merchandise on the Internet one website, is GOOD. that's fuckin cool. Or it would be if Amazon wasn't a predator of a company that used it's position to extort every single small seller and replace their popular products with cheap knockoffs. Imagine a public Amazon where the infrastructure was maintained fairly, aimed at promoting creators and giving consumers what they actually wanted rather than pushing them towards what's most profitable for lex luthor. An Amazon that recognized the heinous labor practices it's same day/next day rushed delivery model is built on and could prioritize the workers' need over the consumers' whims. An Amazon that saw it as a primary responsibility to enforce real carbon neutrality on itself and its vendors. Instead of being a thing that could be a vehicle for public good, all the large things in our society are sucking the life off the face of the earth for profit. And that's why I wish I could just get people to think differently about competition. Like if they could get past the whole nonsense of everything being subject to competition, and see the difference between the situations where steel sharpens steel and the cases where competition will wipe out all variety unless it's stopped. Food is the best example I can think of to show both sides of this. We need the centralization of the food supply chain. And we know this because we already have it. It makes sense through any lens. If your goal is to feed everyone, you plan your agricultural output. If your goal is to maintain stable prices, you plan your agricultural output. You have to have a lot of subsidies and buyout programs to generate more than enough food, and keep the farmers and consumers happy. That doesn't just fuckin happen. It has to be organized by the FDA and USDA. So why do we let general mills and Sysco and Dupont and other companies on that side of the equation get to eat all the surplus from the FDA and USDA coordinate? But on the opposite side you've got restaurants. You can't plan restaurants. The brick and mortar aspect yeah but the menu is *art*. That's where pluralism shines. We give lots of people a chance to try their ideas out; some will last and some won't. The important thing here though is that with the supply chain unified as a public utility, restaurants would have no incentives to scale up anyway. You just make the best food you can make. But I can guarantee you the solution ain't 10 little Syscos.
Retro Social (retro.social)