Not an Amazon Problem
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I rarely go to Walmart, but every few years I do in the USA, and it constantly blows my mind. The quantity, price and quality of 'stuff' in there ... you can live extremely well compared to anyone in 1970 just off Walmart.
I submit that the surpluses are going to consumers, but because we don't price them (i.e. the added value to you in savings or quality doesn't go on the books), it's not part of the equation.
At least in most material ways, the Western World's 'cup runneth over with stuff' ... a lot of which we do not need and is therefore luxury.
The financial profits stack up in the top 10%.
It's unsustainable, but it's not all bad news.
The other 'Elephant in the Room' nobody will talk about are the surpluses to middle class yielded form undocumented workers. The US has 10-20M people 'off the books' working for crap wages, no health insurance. That is a huge part of why everything is so cheap in America. Particularly food and restaurants (the whole value chain is migrant workers it seems).
The #1 thing America could do to reduce inequality would be to force companies to pay a real minimum wage. 1/2 the undocumented workers would be out of a job, the others would see pay increases.
All jobs have to come with healthcare, or at least pay enough such that the income can cover a basic healthcare.gov package or else - what's the point? Collect taxes and redistribute via medicare?
Taxation at the high end could be increased somewhat.
Pushing some of those surpluses into the hands of working people would be a massive boon for the economy.
You assume that middle class Americans are willing, available and able to do those jobs when paid higher wages and benefits. In my many years I have yet to find “Americans” doing roofing jobs for example.
This 'Americans are too lazy' narrative is used as justification for suppressing wages below what previous generations of Americans had gotten enshrined in law as fair compensation for a certain level of risk and discomfort.
If you pay roofers enough and make the job site as safe as possible they’ll do the job. But these companies would prefer to get easy, subservient labor with minimal safety equipment who can’t complain because they’ll get deported.
Artificially underpaying entire industries by turning a blind eye to labor laws or making up industry-specific below market value rules (like agricultural migrant labor visa programs) isn’t really a solution to the problem, in my opinion.
If every undocumented roofer was given a social security card and permission to work, they’d wonder why they’re risking their life on a roof when they’d get better pay, benefits, job security, and guaranteed retirement driving a bus for the city.
One would have to assume that eventually, when roofers are paid as much as those of us who are sitting here reading hackernews, there will be a steady stream of workers inclined to fill these positions. I feel like this is the sort of textbook example taught in Econ 101, and if the "free market" can't even solve even this sort of basic problem without a serf class of undocumented immigrants, it would imply that American-style capitalism itself is a failed experiment.
Most people screaming about how 'Americans' won't do jobs like farming or construction will look at a company named Salazar and assume that Salazar uses undocumented labor. These people will also drive by construct sites, count the number of white workers, and use that as a proxy for how many Americans are working on that job.
In 2015 when my grandparent's home was being torn down and rebuilt, our construction company used Peruvian and Portuguese undocumented labor, supervised by citizen foremen. We had to use our own electrical and plumbing to ensure it would pass city inspection (rather than have delays with corrections during intermediary visits) and complete on time.
And that's before we factor in that the over-the-table employee also costs SS, Medicare, unemployment insurance, overhead costs to administer all this because they clearly don't only have one employee, the list goes on.
Landscaping, too.
I never understood this from an economic perspective. The USA has rules in place for hiring non-citizens to come the country and fill jobs in landscaping. There are X slots a year.
Locally, the landscaping companies were complaining they couldn't do the work without those slots since they couldn't find workers due to the administration cutting the available non-citizen slots. They would come on the radio, complain to a host about hiring college kids to work, but they would leave after a few days.
The landscaping companies weren't raising the wage paid to attract and keep the people who would stay, though. They did raise the wage slightly, but not enough to move the needle.
Shouldn't the wage raise until you attract those people willing to do the work and stay? In turn, the cost of landscaping would rise to the customers.
"X" is effectively zero. A few people get in legally via refugee status or family relationships, but in practice the number of green cards issued is a tiny, tiny fraction the number of jobs that are actually done by immigrant workers.
And it seems like covid isn't adjusting this much. Newly-unemployed legal workers are not rushing into fill gaps in, say, farm worker employment that were previously held by undocumented people. The "Americans won't do these jobs" theory seems to be holding.
If farm workers payed fair wages and provided good living conditions and proper safety and ergonomic tools then sure more workers work be citizens but the disconnect is so large farms would have to double or triple wage costs so it’s easy to claim that they raised wages a buck or 2 and there were still no takers.
Utterances like "Americans won't take these jobs," "We can't find people for this req," are incomplete. The complete characterization is "Americans won't take these job FOR THIS PAY." I did think that for a time, that if everyone was willing to pay a premium for, say, landscaping service, any kind of service really, the premium would pay for the value-added, and the entire industry would slowly be pulled up. I was willing to pay a premium for landscaping, to a company that paid good wages, that hired ethically, and purportedly did excellent work. I paid the premium and got shitty service all the same. This has happened so frequently (tried to be a conscientious consumer, paid the premium, got shitty work that engendered more work for me to fix) it eroded this thinking in me. How do I adequately price X when X+premium still gets me substandard X? The safe action is to default to market price, and the gig economy wage is sliding downward. I don't know how I can individually influence this.
Most of them would be relocated. And Americans will definitely work in restaurants, they do everywhere else. Somehow all of Europe and Canada manage to have crops as well - granted - there may need to be migrant worker program for harvest, but that would be reasonable actually, if it were done legally.
Consumer prices would rise no doubt.
Of course the companies making all this stuff and owning the retail chains were paying lower and lower wages, so they had to decrease the prices of goods through globalization to remain profitable and pay their C-suites ever increasing returns. That and soak people with usurious credit lines.
Also, I doubt the nice, $400 flat screen TV is going to help much in paying your medical bills or keep you from getting evicted when the pandemic affects your health or your job. The broad, material circumstances of working people have little to do with whether they can own a cheap, good quality blender, but instead their overall tenuousness. There’s little in this regard that indicates that people are better off than in the 1970s.
If only Walmart sold healthcare, college education, and New York apartments.
The problem with the American west is that people from California (and the other wealthy coastal areas to a lesser extent) see it as within the range of places they'd consider moving too.
There's no universe in which an rapid infusion of people who have more money than the locals is not bad for every local not selling overpriced garbage to the newcomers for a fat margin.
You see the same problems on the east coast and in the southeast but you see them in more constrained geographical areas because people from NYC don't cash out move to Indiana or Mississippi, they move to Vermont or Pennsylvania.
They also sell like other stores generic medicines at very low costs; the issue being is some reimbursement setups exclude some of these and some politicians did not like the idea of cheap medicines because it undermined their position.
Their business is designed around tearing out margins in the value chain, and passing the savings along to customers. It's a business strategy unheard of - not only do they pass on a lot of savings, they force vendors to do so as well.
The healthcare system is completely fat with gristle, exactly what we need is a Walmart barking up the long-tail.
$15K-$20K for setting a broke arm? I don't think so. $30 for the Aspirin while you're at it? No. $2K for the scan? No goddam way.
Walmart would probably only get into things that could be 'very well operationalised' ie more common stuff.
And consider the vicious leverage they would have over drug makers ...
Healthcare is 15% of the economy and growing, Walmart tearing into Healthcare would be more transformative that the existence of Google.
For any service that Walmart provided, I would be glad to go there.
I'm sure you can find some quality items at Walmart, but you have to shop carefully.
If we were talking Costco healthcare, I'd be all in. All the "cut the fat" talk you mention, and you still end up with a quality product at a reasonable price.
For any arbitrary shopper-item combination, as long as the item can fit the basic merchantability requirements over the duration of the return period, the only significant criterion is going to be price. Knowing this and then ensuring that they have the cheapest merchantable items in every product class is how Walmart became the de-facto shopping nexus everywhere that major social and/or governmental interference hasn't stopped them. It's the place to go to get the stuff you have to buy, not the stuff you want to buy.
If your standards are too high to wear a shirt that consists of 80% recycled plastic, you don't buy shirts at Walmart. But that doesn't mean you automatically have the same high standards for a garden spade, a toilet seat, or a kitchen spatula. If we imagine that we need all four of these items today, we go to Walmart to buy the latter three and then use the money saved to invest in a better 100% cotton shirt from $FAVORITE_SHIRT_VENDOR.
Disagree, quality matters.
Back in the day, Walmart, Microsoft, Starbucks, many others, were pretty fucking terrific with their employee stock grant programs.
I don't know how or why that generosity stopped. But if corporations (specifically, their exec team and board of directors) had continued to share the wealth, we wouldn't now be seriously considering radical cashectomies.
My point of reference is traveling through Germany recently and realizing that I could have a sit-down meal in an amazing cafe in Munich for less than a meal at Panera (which is like McDonald's for sandwiches except they charge more because they use more wood in the decor and more words in the food descriptions). And the waiter in Germany doesn't suggest a 25% tip, unlike the self-serve computer terminals at Panera.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_price_rankings...
Food is labour intensive, labour is expensive in Europe.
I’ll give you one counterexample, but trust me there’s millions of them. Meatpacking is overrun with off the books labor. You could throw around $15, $30 an hour salaries and it wouldn’t matter because salary isn’t the killer. It’s lawsuits from people falling in the equipment that simply go away when the laborer wasn’t supposed to be here. It’s being able to have something like coronavirus come around and react. I’m not repping the current system but catcalls to just solve it aren’t actually helpful, they’re a big reason why we are here in the first place.
'Border security' is not what defines migration patterns - its jobs. If everyone in the US must be paid a reasonable wage, irrespective of documentations status - then it's not only moral and fair, it's also civic. The entire system is deeply hypocritical.
A lot of jobs will disappear, some will get more automated, in some cases prices will be passed on.
I'm doubtful any of it will change: 'one side' is addicted to the votes, the 'other side' addicted to the profits, and secretly everyone is addicted to low prices.
The best thing the government could do is provided visibility into the policies i.e. 'we're going to require $X min wage on this date, and $Y on this date, and after 20XX we're going to be checking on businesses, starting with fines in the first 6 months, and then more serious.
The system would have to adapt - and it absolutely could.
There is some possibility it would happen in that the notion of providing a 'living wage' to everyone would be popular, and it could by virtue of a Supreme Court ruling for example be extended to everyone. It would be then up to the government to theoretically enforce wages and standards for non-citizens, it comes down to the political will - plus - there will be millions pushing for it, thinking about their own personal gain, not necessarily piecing together the likelihood of keeping their jobs. I bet most undocumented workers, once they find out they are legally entitled to a bunch of things, and would have the protection of the justice system ... would push for their ostensible rights.
It would be a pragmatic solution to the 'gaping hole' in the economy, civility, lawlessness and solve a lot of problems at once.
Instead of ICE kicking out illegals, they turn on their head and start enforcing labour laws ... which paradoxically has a much more powerful effect on the border.
But yeah, very unlikely.
Unemployment is bad for unemployed, bad for people around unemployed and bad for the overall economy.
"Increase the minimum wage" recommendation is bad.
Except those aren't the major costs that end up hitting you. It's true that laptops and motorcycles are cheaper and better than ever, but healthcare, rent, and taxes are what will make you bankrupt.
Some people would argue it's government regulation and bureaucracy that drives those astronomic.
Yes. Back in the 1970s, the working class was winning. Working class wages were going up 3x faster than CEO wages. The average employee at an auto factory could afford a house, a car, a non-working wife, a college education for his kids, and a good retirement.
That had to stop. So a plan was put together by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell.[1] This is the actual memo.[2] It's worth reading. Before this, businesses did not lobby much, except over narrow issues. This got the U.S. Chamber of Commmerce into lobbying for business vs labor on a broad front, with funding from big companies.
It worked. Near total victory over union power in the private sector has been achieved in the US. The 8 hour day, the 40 hour week, and the minimum wage have been made ineffective. Funded retirement plans are history. "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." became national policy. Marketed as "individual rights" and "opportunity", of course.
[1] https://billmoyers.com/content/the-powell-memo-a-call-to-arm...
[2] https://d1uu3oy1fdfoio.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/201...
This is what happens when the concept of "individual rights" is directly substituted for the "individual right to choose what you consume" without any regard for any other individual rights, even those which are supposedly hallmarks of the U.S. like voting rights. The more I think about this, the more I'm reminded of Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent.
I think its too simplistic to say the system we had before Reagan/Thatcher was Good and the system now is Bad. But we are definitely seeing the shadow of the neoliberal capitalist system hurt people. And causing large scale social unrest, economic uncertainty, a generational wealth gap, and so on. Apparently some people are angry enough about the whole thing to vote for Trump just to get the neoliberals out of the white house.
And of course, the democratic process should be forcing the government to correct course, but there's been so much capture by lobbyists and wealthy donors that its absolutely failing the people its supposed to serve. Occupy Wall Street, the 2009 economic crash, etc seemed to have no lasting impact on economic policy.
This whole situation seems so central to the current economic and political situation - I don't understand why nobody knows and talks about this stuff.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-growth-annua...
EDIT: Removed suggestion that Greenspan publicly expressed a specific intent to foster worker insecurity.
[1] https://chomsky.info/20120508/
[2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/hh/1997/february/te...
"Continued low levels of inflation and inflation expectations have been a key support for healthy economic performance...Looking ahead, the members of the FOMC expect inflation to remain low and the economy to grow appreciably further. However, as I shall be discussing, the unusually good inflation performance of recent years seems to owe in large part to some temporary factors, of uncertain longevity... Atypical restraint on compensation increases has been evident for a few years now and appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity... The low level of work stoppages of recent years also attests to concern about job security. " [1]
It is telling that Politifact left out that last sentence in its analysis of Chomsky's statement.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/hh/1997/february/te...
It's worth asking why workers felt insecurity when the statistics suggested there shouldn't be any. A related, worthy question is why increasingly lower unemployment rates in the 90s (and even the 2010s) didn't show up in the Phillips Curve predicted increase in wages. My read of this quote is Greenspan speculating at an answer. I don't know if it's correct. I don't even know if economists today agree on an answer. In any case, he certainly doesn't seem to be cheering for precarity.
Probably because they aren't saving enough to be able to weather bad times, because a serious medical issue may ruin them, because no matter how much you save, housing, college, and medical costs will grow in tandem, and because despite official unemployment being low, most employers aren't willing to compromise on worker-hostile policies. [1]
The answer to your puzzle may be that employers have become a lot better at bargaining, lobbying, and union suppression than they were a few decades ago. It may also be the case that the government has become better at maintaining a high enough level of unemployment (through monetary policy) to prevent workers from gaining too much in a boom economy.
[1] Any of the tech folks on HN try asking to not be subjected to an open office hell, prior to this COVID thing? How great of a bargaining position did the software-engineer shortage give you in that conversation?
Medical care is, of course, it's own awful mess.
Higher wages wouldn't fully solve either problem on a society-wide level. If you chang nothing else, I'd expect that costs of all three would rise until they soak up every spare penny of the middle class.
Noting that this was in 1997, this is basically the same point Greenspan was making - he is speculating they felt insecure and so weren't willing to do things like go on strike. It seems a reasonable theory although it's difficult to test if it is correct or not.
Either way, it most certainly doesn't indicate that Greenspan saw this insecurity of workers as a goal.
The left, naturally, points to that as an example of how the government is actively taking steps to depress the labour market (during good economic conditions).
Would you find that criticism to be more on-the-nose than Chomsky's claim?
Related to the discussion on insecurity, it is a good outcome to have an economy where people quit jobs and spent months on a careful job search. 0% unemployment means that nobody does that.
> it is a good outcome to have an economy
It's a good outcome for employers, not employees. If I can quit my job in the morning and get one I'm happy with before lunch, that's good for me - but it also means that employers are desperate for labour.
A sober, careful, multi-month job search is not a good thing for most people. They can't afford it, because they have bills to pay this month, not next year.
> A sober, careful, multi-month job search is not a good thing for most people. They can't afford it, because they have bills to pay this month, not next year.
Your first case (quit and get a job before lunch) is bad for the economy because it means production is constrained by the availability of labor. That is bad for employees even in the short term because it forced employers to find alternatives.
I agree a multi-month job search is a bad thing, and I absolutely agree that avoiding that should be a goal of economic policy. Low, non-zero unemployment addresses this well: if there are many people spending multiple months on job searches then unemployment rises.
Employers always want to find alternatives to paying people for their labour. That's also not my problem.
It's an incredibly weird argument to be making. Employers need a thumb placed on their side of the scale, because otherwise... The country will produce fewer goods then it otherwise would? And because otherwise, they'll seek to reduce their costs, by employing fewer people? They are always motivated to do that anyways, and they are in a much worse position to do it than if they could trivially fire and replace their workforce, and if they are slower at accumulating profits.
> The left, naturally, points to that as an example of how the government is actively taking steps to depress the labour market (during good economic conditions).
I'm left leaning and I'd say anyone who thinks zero unemployment should be a goal is naive and uniformed.
Zero unemployment means for example forced employment of unmotivated employees, and zero market dislocation from geographic mobility.
https://theconversation.com/why-the-unemployment-rate-will-n... is a good discussion of this.
Getting it to zero does not require any forced employment, or any restraints on geographic mobility, or babushkas with home scales weighing you for five kopeks at the entrance to the Leningradski railway terminal.
I can say "the rise in house prices before 2008 appears to be mainly the consequence of permissive loan policies by banks" without meaning that I think either high or low house prices or permissive or non-permissive loan policies are good or bad.
Read the entire thing. It's not quite "pants on fire", its just not an exact quote. OP posting "explicitly" is incorrect since it's from Chomsky, however.
Another weakness in your grand theory is that across housing, cars, single incomes, and retirement, many of the affordability concerns have just as much to do with non-corporate organizing as corporate organizing. Since when did the Fortune 500 coordinate to jack up tuition? Which S&P companies run local planning boards? Low income households in other countries can afford decent housing stock and higher education. Corporations aren’t the reason our low income residents can’t. As a quick point, this isn’t a mere matter of a shrunken state either, since our government spending as a % of GDP has steadily risen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_Uni...
I will concede that other people may explain that country's economic failures differently than I do. However, my view is not a fringe one, and since I have left, decreasing worker power has been correlated with a period of relative growth for the middle class.
So whose anecdotal evidence do we take, yours or mine?
Of course, like all good propaganda there is an element of truth to it but I believe the political situation of the time was a lot more nuanced that current portrayals would have you believe - Dominic Sandbrook's books are rather good.
e.g. Right wing accounts of the UK industrial failure usually omit the effect of absolutely awful senior management in the lot of industries. Of course, left wing account similarly fail to mention the appalling behaviour by some unionised workers.
Without renewables, oil was an absolutely bedrock commodity, directly influencing the prices of energy and raw materials.
At their peak, oil prices increased by 400%.
But apparently we're supposed to believe that greedy unions were entirely to blame, and oil prices and shortages had no effect on inflation whatsoever. Because cost-push isn't a thing, or something.
Even if it was a conspiracy it isn't obvious it is a conspiracy against the common good. The American economic system has been a powerful force for good in the world - America is a hugely popular migration destination because of their superior economics and the alternatives at the time of the letter were places like the Soviet Union, Maoist China or Europe re-emerging from the rubble of their failures to maintain order and prosperity.
They weren't talking about "Communists" who were advocating for "like, life sucks for the poor, man" or modern "fascists" who want less immigration. The communists had just finished killing millions of people and their signature accomplishment were some of the greatest mass famines in history. Everyone knew someone who died fighting actual militant fascists. A rational person would have been very interested in protecting the American economic system as one of the few shining lights of progress in 1971.
A particularly striking example is the case of Lincoln Hospital in NYC which was taken over by a leftist group named the Young Lords that received a million bucks a year from the famously bankrupt city government to run a putative methadone clinic and Marxist education intensive. The details are a bit of an aside, but long story short the clinic had poor outcomes for patients, doctors dying of heroin overdoses, staff absentee rates in the 70%s, and about 4x more in spending per patient than city run hospitals. Yet it still kept getting funding renewed until 1978 through a variety of lobbying schemes. Some contemporary publications write of this medical failure fondly: https://filtermag.org/how-the-young-lords-took-lincoln-hospi....
You’re right - I should have offered a source. You can reference the extensive reporting here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/307365/days-of-rage...
[1] https://monthlyreview.org/commentary/fictionalizing-radical-...
Do you have any reasonably sturdy evidence that the claims you made are correct? Until you can prove them, you have cited no facts, but only made claims. Those claims are yours to support. Asking me to prove a negative doesn't really accomplish anything in that regard.
I'm still not sure why I should be regarding Burrough's account as more likely to be true to historical fact than all of the other accounts I've been able to find. If nothing else, he, and you, have got an uphill battle in convincing anyone that his account is right, and everyone else's is wrong. You don't seem to recognize that. Perhaps he does. You seem to be quite familiar with the book; maybe he's more willing to support the claim than you so far have been, and has something better to offer than simple assertion. If you don't want to go to the trouble of trying to find references of your own, why not at least copy out whatever on the subject can be found in his bibliography?
And you know everyone is entitled to representation
The American economic system has always lived on the shoulders of the American Empire - with almost free access to exploit resources within and outside the US with little regard for human life, especially the lives of non-citizens (slaves, foreigners). Combined with public research being funneled into private hands, usually under the guise of military research (see the entire IT industry in the 1960s-70s, and bio-engineering today); and with vast subsidies, either direct or as government guarantees of financial products; the capitalist system owes much of its success to the vast power of the American state, and has never been successfully replicated in significantly weaker countries (though it has been tried time and time again, usually under American guidance).
Look at the Banana Republics, entire countries ruthlessly operated by US banana companies.
Look at the numerous coups that the US orchestrated against democratic governments that weren't aligned to the interests: Iran (installing the Shah, arming him, convincing and aiding him to start a nuclear program), Vietnam, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Cuba (unsuccessfully), Guatemala, Indonesia, and others.
Their support of/demand for Indonesian occupation and massacres in Timor.
Their support of Saddam Hussein's war against Iran (after the US-installed shah was deposed), including use of chemical weapons.
The numerous atrocities committed by the CIA all over Latin America, either directly or through the guerrillas they were controlling - in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala etc.
The many war crimes against Vietnam, including slaughter of civilians, burning crops and forests, destroying civilian infrastructure and hospitals.
The unquestioning support of Israel's brutal occupation of Palestine, of Israel's possession of illegal nuclear weapons.
The direct support of Saudi Arabia's slaughter of Yemeni civillians, with arms, know-how, embargoes, and diplomatic means.
The long years of Black slavery in the US. Medical experiments on black troops. Forced sterilization of black men and women, and of those considered mentally unfit.
I grew up somewhere that was a victim of both European and American imperialism and they really aren't comparable. Even in some of the Latin American countries worst hurt by American capitalist imperialism, I think it would probably be unfair to say that it was equal to or worse than what European colonialism did.
However, what the USSR did after Stalin is usually much milder than what the US did to their client states. It's true also that at least some, but most likely all, of the European colonial empires were atrocious as well. Discussing the relative merits of each disgusting atrocity is hard.
Still, the things that the US did in Latin America and Asia are absolutely on that level of human misery. Tortured children, imposed famines, indiscriminate killing, use of systematic rape as a form of punishment/deterrence, forced labor, ethnically motivated power structures, deliberate destruction of democracy and of the industrial power of some of these countries, the whole shebang.
So perhaps it would be unfair to say that it was worse than European colonialism, but it was certainly equal (though I fully admit, not as bad as Stalin: Probably worse than any later USSR leader)
There are, of course, hundreds of other examples.
Since those large corporations funneled money and influence into parties and institutions that work tirelessly to cut government budgets and make the PR argument that government can never be employed to solve problems.
You’re saying this sarcastically but there is in fact a direct link between corporate power and politics at all levels.
[1] https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
In addition, you’ll find many of the board members come from the local construction companies, who then win the contracts for demolishing and constructing new university buildings.
In principal, this is all driven by the competition for consumers, I mean students, who are hyper-focused on college ranking prestige in the name of future employment with, well...
The SDS and the Weathermen had almost no mainstream political influence relative to the business lobby, so obviously they can’t be compared in this way. Public college administration increasingly became corporatized and managed by the same business interests. Elite universities always have been. Local planning boards are captured by the wealthy in their communities. The economic trouble was driven by the oil shock, not high rates of unionization. Many countries in Europe have high rates of unionization and are not in anyway “barren.”
Sure, course corrections are always needed, but there's no denying the oversteer of the neoliberal policies since. We've learned a lot since the 70s and it's probably productive to update our mental models and worldview.
Others have already addressed these specific claims, and I'll add that this whole way of thinking (where anything and everything is the outcome of shady "plans" being hatched somewhere) does not generally lead to a good understanding of social problems. But this is not to say that progress in working-class compensation hasn't clearly stalled since the 1970s. Part of the issue is of course that a lot of that putative income has been offset by the huge increase in healthcare and education costs. And that's probably something where policy interventions are warranted, if only to reduce existing market distortions that put consumers at a huge disadvantage.
These costs increase to the maximum amount the individual is willing to sacrifice to obtain these services. Because they are inelastic services - you cannot substitute healthcare. You can barely substitute education (esp. tertiary). And there's not a lot of economy of scale with these services, which makes it hard to lower the cost in competition (if there's even any).
You can. For every health condition, there are a wide range of options varying in cost, efficacy, risk, time and pain.
I recently went to the doctor over a problem I have, and got a rather broad array of options. I decided the risks of each option were worse than the problem, and decided to live with it.
The notion that there is a one-to-one mapping of problem-to-solution is incorrect.
Broadly speaking: if you experience dire medical trauma — say you have a heart attack or get in a bad car accident — you need emergency care or you’ll probably die. If you have cancer, you need to treat it or you’ll die. If a vital organ stops working, you need to find a functional replacement or you’ll die.
You may have multiple options for treatment, or you may not. But for many health conditions, the choice is ultimately binary: treat your ailment or die. That sounds to me like a service that cannot be substituted.
Besides, emergency conditions (being transported to the hospital in dire condition in an ambulance) are not at all where the vast bulk of health care is.
is there one that's cheap? Can i buy an aspirin pill for cancer?
A substitute is not the same as options - a substitute implies lower cost but does the same job. Chicken is a substitute for beef (which is generally more expensive). Therefore, beef cannot become _too_ much more expensive than chicken, as people will just opt to buy the chicken.
But if you have cancer, and each treatment still costs thousands per visit/session, then they are not substitutes.
1. radiation
2. chemo
3. surgery
4. some combination of the above
All have their pluses and minuses. Sometimes people with terminal cancer opt for no treatment, as they'd rather enjoy a shorter time than have a painful longer time.
The notion there is no choice is simply incorrect.
Usually these treatment options would be weighed by a board of experts from the different medical fields involved, taking into account the individual patient's constraints.
I don't really see how you come to the conclusion that there is much of a choice for a cancer patient. It's not like you can tell the tumor board "I want surgery" when that's not a clinically viable option. And it's also not like any of these options is particularly affordable - any of them will easily bankrupt someone living from paycheck to paycheck. Heck, the MRI scan alone can.
It's still pretty binary between "get reasonable treatment costing tens of thousands or die", as the other poster pointed out.
Because I know several people who've had dire cancers, and they all had choices and made choices among the treatment options.
What till you see climate change decimate food production, and you will see how inelastic food is, and the resultant price increases will be eye watering.
Individuals do not pay for healthcare services, many do not know the actual true costs.
Individuals in most cases do not pay - insurance companies do. This explains the high costs moreso than your example,.
Insurance companies minimize payouts to maximize profit - but they offer coverage that they often can't control the price of. It becomes a business negotiation between the hospital and insurance company.
The actual patient and the services rendered are many times irrelevant. If pricing was based on individual consumers you would see that reflect in pricing - no one would overpay for a cotton swab, for example.
:thinking-face:
That's weird, I use healthcare, and yet I still pay monthly premiums. Can you explain why I don't fit into your explanation?
That memo, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Business Roundtable, turned that mindset around. It took a lot of time, effort, and money. It created many organizations. Conservative think tanks came from that effort.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/hyh565/wtf_happen...
I just think the factors behind this are somewhat different from the usual class war rhetoric - on both sides. I think the first effect is the introduction of hundreds of millions of workers in developing countries. China obviously, but also South Korea, Taiwan, also India particularly in financial and IT services. This has created a lot of downward pressure on labour prices in the developed world.
I think another effect is the property market sweeping up huge swathes of individual wealth and income. By and large there's a limited stock of desirable property. We all need a place to live, and when we have families and children we want the best home we can afford for them and us. That means increasing proportions of our wages have been spent in a bidding war against each other over the available housing. Certainly here in the UK this is a huge problem. Massive state subsidies to help new home owners get into property has just exacerbated the problem, hugely inflating the price of low and mid level housing particularly. Preferential tax treatment of property investments (in the UK anyway) also encouraged huge numbers of people to invest in property and become landlords.
I'm no economist so maybe I'm overestimating these shifts because I've seen and felt the effect of these factors personally, but I'm convinced they're having a considerable impact. On developing world labour I'm not sure much can be done about that, these people deserve jobs as much as anyone. I think things will even out though, I go to China regularly and wage growth over there has been staggering. As for property prices, it's about time we took a close look at the tax treatment of whats essential rental income and also inheritances. I think there's a shift needed favouring income from labour over capital. Don't get me wrong, I'm a thoroughgoing capitalist, but there's an imbalance there that needs redressing without resorting to class war eat the rich crap.
Prices for things with no government subsidy or interference have dropped to essentially zero - like software.
The "Law of Unintended Consequences". This constantly trips up well-intentionend people who support government interference in markets. Their goals are noble, but quite often the outcome is the exact opposite of what was intended.
This hasn't happened. Rising incomes in the upper-middle class and above since the 1980s are largely driven by labor income in highly skill-biased sectors. (You'd think that the HN crowd would be rather familiar with this whole dynamic, but apparently not.)
On the other hand, There was a heroin epidemic, crime was skyrocketing, white flight was draining our cities of tax dollars, pollution was terrible, we had lines for gasoline
Not to mention US engineering and manufacturing started to decline. American started getting lazy and Japan started entering markets with superior products, soon to be followed by China and Mexico, ready to pounce with cheaper alternatives.
500,000 people are bankrupted by the health care system every year, carbon pollution is literally endangering the entire planet, the US has some of the lowest educational standards and poorest social mobility in the developed world, and the US establishment solution to a relatively straightforward health threat like Coronavirus is an ongoing fiasco.
And... the lines for gasoline were caused by OPEC constraints on gasoline, not by feckless poor people agitating for their rights.
The working class today has higher wages and a higher quality of life.
If you’re a woman or any kind of minority, things are vastly better for you than in the 1970s. If you’re skilled, things are vastly better for you.
Unskilled white man labor was going to decline no matter what Reagan and Thatcher did as computers and automation changed production across the world.
Your belief is opposite reality.
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2019/comm/one-...
Lobbying America: The Politics of Business from Nixon to NAFTA https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17942038-lobbying-americ...
"Lobbying America" tells the story of the political mobilization of American business in the 1970s and 1980s. Benjamin Waterhouse traces the rise and ultimate fragmentation of a broad-based effort to unify the business community and promote a fiscally conservative, antiregulatory, and market-oriented policy agenda to Congress and the country at large. Arguing that business's political involvement was historically distinctive during this period, Waterhouse illustrates the changing power and goals of America's top corporate leaders.
Examining the rise of the Business Roundtable and the revitalization of older business associations such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Waterhouse takes readers inside the mind-set of the powerful CEOs who responded to the crises of inflation, recession, and declining industrial productivity by organizing an effective and disciplined lobbying force. By the mid-1970s, that coalition transformed the economic power of the capitalist class into a broad-reaching political movement with real policy consequences. Ironically, the cohesion that characterized organized business failed to survive the ascent of conservative politics during the 1980s, and many of the coalition's top goals on regulatory and fiscal policies remained unfulfilled. The industrial CEOs who fancied themselves the "voice of business" found themselves one voice among many vying for influence in an increasingly turbulent and unsettled economic landscape.
Complicating assumptions that wealthy business leaders naturally get their way in Washington, "Lobbying America" shows how economic and political powers interact in the American democratic system."
and
> every reporter I’ve talked to has tried to get me to say awful things about Amazon and in particular about Jeff Bezos. But at my last job they taught me to think big and, with all his billions, Jeff is rounding error in the big picture.
This sounds like the media business needs a reboot and that we only ascribe such a high value to it because we didn't get a look into the sausage factory before. We belived the nice stories the journalists told about themselves.
Today we can read what Tim Bray thinks about his interaction with journalists. Before the internet he would never had been able to communicate this to people in the rest of the world.
I also believe in his genuine reasons and motivations for resigning, and the integrity it showed. (Obligatory: yes, he's in his 60s who's made millions, at some point you gotta retire, and it's easy to show integrity when you clearly don't need to work again)
Having said that, I'm kind of surprised he's surprised by the overall reaction that he got when he quit, and in interviews since then.
It's popular, easy, and desirable to dunk on Amazon. It's the best form of mainstream journalistic clickbait because it brings in and unites the left (who want improved worker rights, and Jeff B is a poster child for wealth imbalance) and the right (who are mad at Jeff's perceived left-leaning politics and criticism of Donald Trump via the Washington Post).
It is NOT popular to question the very fabric of our western capitalism. Overtures about unsustainable wealth inequality do not resonate well in the mainstream. At the fringes, the right blames the rest of the world, and looks to isolate; the left is readying the guillotines.
I think Tim should have known that his message would be misconstrued by both other Amazonians who remained and wrote defensive blog posts, and the rest of the world who's holding him up as some Anti-Amazon Crusader.
I believe his mistake was to immediately start talking about worker's rights when his actual ethical qualm was about the chilling effect of silencing whistleblowers. But...then he wouldn't have had the NYTimes writing follow ups months later.
Yes, i know i just said "worker" but that's not really what we all imagine when we think about Amazon workers that need more protections.
This is especially pernicious given that fundamental facility and process design decisions are made by the 'white-collar workers'. I wonder, for example, how bathroom or break-room access in Amazon fulfillment centres would change if the tech people shared a coffee or equivalent with people that work in pick+pack on a frequent and regular basis.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Business/retaliation-amazon-warehouse...
> Having said that, I'm kind of surprised he's surprised by the overall reaction that he got when he quit, and in interviews since then.
I wonder if he got any advice when doing these interviews. The photographs used for his NYT interview are of him... posing on his private boat.
It's like they were designed to make him look like a millionaire hypocrite who has retired with as much as they could from Amazon and now criticising while swimming in the money. He's been somewhat set up here by whoever managed this interview.
But anyway the point is - at some point he was in a conversation about what kind of photos to use to illustrate his article about how the company he's been working at for years doesn't treat it's employees very nicely. And someone suggested - 'how about we take some photos of you posing at the controls of your luxury leisure vehicle' and he said yes, which was a mistake because whoever suggested it was either deliberately setting him up or not the right person to be advising him.
You couldn't come up with a better visual metaphor for hypocrisy if you were trying - and clearly someone was trying.
I would think the opposite, that it would show solidarity.
His outfit might be whatever the current equivalent of Patagucci would be, but is otherwise unremarkable Pacific Northwest, sandals being common due to frequent rain. The series 2 landy might be middle class, in that I suspect it costs nearly as much to run as to acquire, but very few would consider series landies luxury leisure vehicles, either. They're closer to a real tractor than a Chelsea Tractor.
...then again, a new Chelsea Tractor is probably much cheaper than a new real tractor :-)
He clearly talks about the millions he left on the table at Amazon. If anything, it's more powerful that a millionaire is fighting for the working class and showing some small hint of putting his money where his mouth is. That is a rarer image.
But that's how this works... seems harmless to him due to his context so he goes along with it. Looks different to someone living inland who thinks only rich people have money and time for boats.
Unfortunately, it's all lofty language and Amazon lags behind its peers on real action.
For the AWS cloud business Amazon lags far behind its peers at Microsoft and Google. Of the three main public clouds AWS is the only one still using coal power (coal is a big part of the power mix for the grid used by their largest point of presence in Northern Virgina). Microsoft and Google have run their data centers completely on renewables and have done so for years.
We're stuck on us-east-1 in Northern Virginia for legacy reasons and to make up for the dirty way that Amazon runs its cloud we buy feed-in RECs for the grid where our AWS instances run. AWS could be doing this themselves (there are RECs available! we're buying them!) to help jumpstart the transition to renewables in the energy markets where they operate but they're simply choosing not to spend the money.
Microsoft and Google deserve credit for their work in this area and they're doing a much better job. It's just too bad that AWS is a better technical product for our workload.
The climate pledge has started to make an impact: https://climatepledgearena.com/. And there are plenty of articles that seem to indicate the climate pledge is doing things: https://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2020/06/30/amazons...
These might be puff pieces, but at least from reading them, it seems like Amazon is actually moving towards doing things. Not only that, but they are getting other companies to sign the pledge and take action.
Google has been running on 100% renewable electricity since 2017. Microsoft has reached that milestone as well, but I can not find a date for when they achieved it.
AWS aspires to eventually reach that goal by 2025. One of the clouds is dirtier than the others.
See: https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/renewable/ "In 2019, for the third year in a row, Google purchased enough renewable energy to match 100 percent of our annual global electricity consumption". They are not running on renewable energy, they are simply buying RECs. Albeit, one can argue that is better than not buying RECs, but it is misleading to claim they are "running on 100% renewable energy"
Yes, Amazon is a problem, and no, it's by far not the only one.
I am quite not sure that breaking up big businesses like Amazon and Google will change things much, by the way. And I am not sure that unionizing Amazon would solve much, either.
To be honest, I am quite pessimistic about our ability, as a society / human specie, to really solve the inequality problem Tim is mentioning. Sorry I don't have better words to say.
From [Wealth, shown to scale](https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/)
And breaking up the phone company didn't improve anything. We just got AT&T again from their well-performing Texas shard. Companies need to be regulated to provide the services the author is looking for.
Now that fractional shares can be bought with no commission, essentially everyone who wants to can invest in those FAANG companies and get returns on capital. They're better than lottery tickets (a popular "investment" for the poor).
Harry Truman said in 1945 about the atomic bomb, "We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies". I feel the same way about FAANG and Silicon Valley as a whole (and Wall Street, and Hollywood, and SpaceX/Tesla, and the Ivy League), that they are in the United States.
That doesn't mean I approve of everything they do. That doesn't mean I can't or won't decry their putting thumbs on scales toward a certain type of bien-pensant ideology. That does mean that, overall, I am very, very glad that they are American instead of Russian, Chinese, or even British, French, or German.
Taiwan has TSMC (which has a comparable market cap), and it hasn't exactly transformed that nation, other than perhaps becoming a technological source of strategic importance.
It seems like your post argues for their importance due to the benefits that investors can receive from them. But you always could buy blue chip stocks and $SPY.
A flood of tax money due to Amazon has flooded into the city. If the city doesn't spend it well, they aren't going to do better if prosperity flees the city.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zillow/2018/01/19/what-amazons-...
I didn't say unalloyed.
Alibaba is unlikely to be able to capture US regulators to quash its newly energized and more numerous US competitors.
Monopolies have an unfair amount of leverage in this game that must be dealt with. Bring in corporate breakups, bring in increased leverage for the workers (it's time to say the u-word), and maybe, just maybe, we can salvage this system yet.
I don't know about you, but it was the dream of making the world better for everyone and not just a handful of CEOs that sold me on the tech industry. I sure would like for that dream to come true, no matter how many zeroes in valuation it costs.
You can't remove capitalism from the last few centuries of massive progress and just say "it would have happened without it as well".
This isn't a minor nitpick. You've articulating an impossible thing as a target. There is no sane path forward from that starting point.
Fed, housed and clothed is a great baseline, but it has nearly nothing to do with inequality. If everyone in the world was fed, housed and clothed I expect all the inequality measures would be about the same as they are now.
And I think removing the main problem caused by inequality has everything to do with inequality. It's not the end all, but like I said, it's a great baseline.
Inequality of what characteristics?
Because having sufficient food and clean water makes an incredible difference to ones fulfillment and ability to focus on less basic needs.
I'm pretty sure the parent comment to yours was referring to availability of healthcare [and associated aspects such as nutrition and exercise] according to needs, rather than expecting that we can get cancer to agree to a treaty.
But surely it is possible to make them more healthy than they currently are through better housing, through better nutrition, through less stress and uncertainty, through better access to healthcare, through less reliance on "sins" like alcoholism, smoking, and drug addiction because their lives are objectively less awful.
Quit being obtuse.
No, it goes deeper than that. It is impossible for everyone's health to be equal. There is always going to be some very unhealthy people.
Having everyone "fed, housed and clothed" is literally achievable. I can count the people then count the calories, houses & clothes. In practice it wouldn't be perfect, but there is an obvious limit where that baseline can be achieved.
Having everyone "be healthy" is unachievable. In any imaginable scenario within the bounds of current technology and resources there will be a large number of people who we can point to and say "these people aren't healthy and we could do more for them".
This isn't me being obtuse, this is pointing out that "being healthy" is fundamentally a shifting standard changes to be relative to approximating median health outcomes. We can't achieve it as a baseline because as we approach it the baseline will move.
Yes, they might not get the most nutritious or balanced diet but they get the calories they need, oftentimes too many.
This is exactly the kind of moving target the parent is complaining about. Pretty much everyone is fed. But people then move the goalposts and pretend the progress didn't happen because they're not fed nutritiously enough or it requires too much work, etc, etc. I'm not denying that there's more work to do but it's folly to pretend that western nations have not more or less solved hunger compared to the situation even 50yr ago.
You can see this in the statistics for average height, which shot up all through the 1800s. Other countries did not really catch up until after WW2, and then only when they turned to capitalist agriculture.
We didn't get government mandated workplace safety until it was basically the norm and people convinced the government to crack down on the places it wasn't the norm.
Many, dare I say most, societal changes follow this "the change mostly happens then the government forces the stragglers to get on board" manner. You simply don't have strong legislation in democracies until after the public opinion has already shifted (see same sex marriage for another example).
Kids make for lousy workers. For example, for the sake of this discussion put aside your moral feelings, and think about kids in your workplace. That's right, there's little useful they could do, and you'd have to dedicate adults to trying to get them to do something useful. Think of what schoolteachers go through trying to get work out of kids. Think of what parents go through trying to get their kids to clean their rooms.
Similarly, child labour is still very common and as far as I'm told in some places even on the rise, so there must be more to the story of its disappearance from the west than "children make bad workers".
That is what made those societies successful anyway: freedom which brought innovation which brought prosperity. Not the fact that they were "western".
If that wasn't true, every employee would be at minimum wage, and Google wouldn't offer free lunches.
The evidence that free markets lift people up is enormous.
Today we have a large group of mistreated sweatshop labourers that produce clothes and gadgets for the industrialized world under conditions that would never be accepted in America, much less Europe. Are those conditions not a result of free markets? Companies who were free to move their production to places that were not encumbered with things like safety laws and minimum wages? And what in the world makes you think that those conditions will become universally a thing of the past without intervention?
No law in Cambodia forces seamstresses to work 16 hour days, no law is forcing the sweatshop owners to demand this of them, everyone involved is in principle free, indeed they are probably freer than I am in my country. That is why the works takes places there and not here.
The labour there creates billions of euros of surplus value that end up as profits for the multinational companies that employ them (directly or indirectly). There is enough money made in the clothing industry to pay decent wages to these people, just like there is enough money in many of the companies in Europe and America that employ the "working poor" to pay people what they need, but it is not done, because by and large companies pay people as little as they can get away with.
This is a problem that can only be solved empowering workers to make demands of their employers. Some workers are rare enough that they have this power by default - I know this, I am one of them, for now. But for the rest, the best way to empower workers is to allow them to band together, either directly in unions, or indirectly via progressive governments making sure that the legislative frameworks that companies operate under result in a decent quality of life, even for those in unskilled jobs.
The evidence that capitalism produces prosperity is overwhelming.
When invasive species take over an environment, the most efficient way to rehabilitate it is often to tolerate and harvest them. Eventually the nutrients they were able to extract where nothing else could thrive become more available and more niches get created. It's unfortunate to be in a lean time historically, but I think tech monopolies need to make themselves obsolete, I don't think it can be done to them while preserving the environment that allowed them to thrive.
But for the hacker news crowd, I’d point to this: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/the-real-class-wa...
TL;DR the income growth of the 0.1% is having a chilling effect on mid-level executives at Amazon and Google, too.
1% eponymous class
9% professional elite
90% working class
2% inner party
13% outer party
85% proletariat
[1] I've always thought of 1984 as being a very anglophone sort of dystopia, but now I believe Orwell was writing therapeutically, cathartically imagining a world in which the social constructs of his second-rate english boarding school applied to the whole of society.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23825457
[2] if Orwell had channelled PG, his labels would be:
dogs pigs aggressive
sheep donkeys passive
orthodox heterodox> Amazon is a perfectly OK company, to the extent that planetary-scale sprawling corporate behemoths can be perfectly OK in 2020. Which is to say, not OK at all.
Very well put - if Amazon wasn't around, the system all but guarantees that some other company would play the same kind of role. "Hate the game, don't hate the player"
Yep, to the extent that its a deal breaker for new jobs. AWS API is awesome. 10yrs cloud engineer here.
At no point in the American story does it say that wealth is to be distributed fairly. The past century has shown that as popular revolts upended the old ideas of aristocracy and monarchy, the US elite became extremely fearful of the idea of a more equal society. Communism was the worst specter of this potential loss of personal wealth for the elites, but its modern forms are also increased taxation, universal health care, increased public education/transporation/housing, etc. The more you distribute wealth to the rabble, the less wealth you can have as an individual, and Americanism is all about personal wealth (personal freedom comes largely from personal wealth; you can't even be the king of a puddle if you don't own the land it sits on).
It's similar to ancient Rome. The citizens can live quite comfortably as long as they have soldiers, slaves, and foreign riches. The big corporations of today are a modern-day Roman army: roving the world to capture and bring home cheap goods. The generals, senators, and merchants get the majority of the loot, and the citizens get fresh bread and garum, fruit, and the occasional exotic spice.
And much like the circuses of Empire, as long as the rabble are kept in bread and games, they'll put up with anything. No health care, no education, 3 jobs? Keep them in bread and games and they'll be satisfied. Netflix provides the circus, Wal-Mart provides the bread. Why would the rabble want them broken up when they're getting exactly what they want?
So this notion of fighting the status quo is really anti-American. You can't get far with the argument without butting heads against the fact that people would have to give up their cheap t-shirts, and that some would always have to work hard and live poor their whole lives. There's no way around it: somebody has to pay for our wealth, surplus, and convenience. If it's not us, it'll have to be someone else.
As a foreigner, I am trying to understand this statement.
You've got a bag with 100 marbles. 50 blue, 40 red, 10 white. HR needs to pick 15 marbles. Does the HR try to pick all marbles equally? So 50% of whites, 10% of blues, 12.5% of reds is chosen. Doesn't seem fair to blues and reds.
Note no value judgement on any of this, it's just a paradox that has been amusing my brain a bit re: social justice. Righting wrongness almost by definition involves more wrongness. "Killing a killer" might be a good summary of the paradox.
It is really easy to say that overcompensation for a mistake is a bad thing when you are on the side who did the initial mistake. A white man in tech, or a citizen of a 1st world industrialized country which grew as an economic behemoth by polluting the world without thinking of the consequences for 50 years. People gets easily, really easily used to their good conditions and privileges, especially if their real cost is somehow hidden and at the expense of others. It is part of the human nature in the end, but that doesn't mean it is "right".
How? I can see a reasonable argument that its not a fiting metaphor, but i don't see how you can say its absurd, since there clearly exist countries that use capital punishment for homocide.
Edit: Also to be clear, reductio ad absurdum is a positive thing to say about someone's argument. It is not a fallacy.
Otherwise you could argue that prison is not the right answer to certain crimes because there could be death penalty for a atrocious enough crime.
That's not what reductio ad absurdum (fancy latin for basically proof by contradiction) means. You're claiming that the comparison is inapropriate. reductio ad absurdum means that the comparison is good, but the thing being compared to is rediculous, and since the rediculous thing is the same as the main thing, the main thing must also be rediculous, and therefor false.
> Taking away benefits cannot be compared with taking away a life.
Why not? I don't see anything inherently contradictory in doing so. Whether or not the comparison is compelling is a separate question.
> Otherwise you could argue that prison is not the right answer to certain crimes because there could be death penalty for a atrocious enough crime.
Yes you could. Lots of people do. I don't support the death penalty myself, but there certainly exist people who do and its a practise that is still extant in some parts of the world.
Claiming that overcompensation can be brought to the extreme of justifying death penalty to me is absurd, that's why I said that. But I understand that I may be wrong so, definitions a part, to me it's still comparing apples to oranges. And while oranges may be acceptable, apples definitely are not.
They don't? Well, then they are hypocrites who want other people to subsidize their fantasies.
And it boils down to "what's unfair", doesn't it? Is a different life expectancy a signal of unfairness? A different wealth or education level? A different rate of depression, mental illness, or suicide? There's a lot of picking and choosing when it comes to picking the data to consider when evaluating unfairness, I believe.
To address your examples, the state should try to help people with abnormally low life expectancy achieve higher life expectancy, try to equalize different wealth and education levels by making education available/affordable to everyone, by severely limiting wealth distribution by inheritance, and so on, and help people with mental illness to lead a normal life as others (which could include all kinds of measures from tax-funded mental health care to changes in work law).
I don't really want to defend luck egalitarianism here, although I personally consider it a reasonable position. It's an example to point out that relative to a theory of fairness the solutions can be fairly clear. The "picking and choosing" is rather the result of disagreement about the respective theory of justice.
The largest inequality I see in real life is between first-born women and their younger siblings. First-born women are often hyper competitive and earn way more than their siblings, including brothers.
Should we discriminate against first-borns in university admissions?
Of course, why shouldn't we help people who are second, third, or fourth born if they are at a systematic disadvantage according to robust data?
AFAIK, many societies have changed hereditary law over the past centuries to compensate for former advantages of first-borns in favour of other family members.
But we don't, and that's generally accepted, isn't it? There's a strong (and recent!) difference between male and female life expectancy, but we accept that, because "men" aren't one of the chosen minorities.
The issue is exactly what you mentioned there: "abnormally low life expectancy". Once we declare something normal, we're done, no more intervention necessary. We could just do the same with poor people and only help those that are abnormally poor. But we don't, because reasons.
I have to disagree. If at all, the people who make the decisions whom to help and whom not to help are Prioritarians (due to the popularity of Rawl's famous book), which is exactly the position you describe. I have inadvertantly slipped into Prioritarian language when I used "abnormally."
What I had in mind and you criticize is Luck Egalitarianism. That's a fringe position that I've never heard from any politician or decision maker. Larry Temkin defends it, for instance, in case you're interested in the actual reasons rather merely dismissing them with a phrase like "because reasons." There are good reasons for it, and I personally find luck egalitarianism more compelling than Prioritarianism.
The general premise i have usually heard is something along the lines that selection in the work environment often involves nepotism, networking, "cultural fit" and other under-handed ways of biasing the results. This is both unfair and a self-perpetuating prophecy. The explicit action of forcing a selection criteria will hopefully break the cycle and "reset" the system to an equal playing field.
While I can understand the resistance to selection criteria if it removes more nuanced decisions necessary in building a team, I can't think of a better way to offset those biases you describe. Those biases are extreme and clearly, left to our own devices, we do a bad job addressing or recognizing them.
There is a similar issue in the theory of just resource distribution, where it can be shown that a more egalitarian resource distribution can sometimes only be achieved by temporarily allowing transfers that are not Pareto optimal. In other words, to make a society juster in terms of overall resource distribution you might sometimes have to make everyone worse off for some time. (If you don't allow such transfers, you'll be forced to call a society with a Gini index close to 1 "just", which would be absurd.)
On a side note, since that was mentioned by others, there is no such thing as "personal justice". Justice always concerns society as a whole, since it concerns the effects that the actions of members of society have on each other.
If anything it seems to be growing in scope and prevalence.
Take for example, the New York times calling to end blind orchestra auditions, and take race into account for making hiring decisions: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...
[Citation needed]
Secondly, it (not-)temporarily disadvantages everyone of a specific gender or race, no matter if they were advantaged in the first place.
Do you have any proof that unfairness against a group mostly harms those with advantage?
For instance if white men are over represented as professors, it may seem fair to discriminate until the numbers are equal. But if you broke the group of white men up into young and old, you'd find it's the young who are being punished for the success of the old.
Suddenly by redrawing the groups it's gone from being fair to unfair. Who divides up the groups?
Is it even possible to be fair to groups without being unfair to individuals?
When fair participation has been reached among equally skilled and trained participants. A lot of progress has been made. Women and black people are allowed to vote now, for example. People in wheelchairs can to some extent travel on their own and even enter their workplace. That used to be impossible in the 60s.
More members of disadvantaged groups are in better positions in society than in the past. There was even one black president in the US among 45. It still seems impossible for a woman to become president, though.
By "temporary" I meant 50-100 years or so. It also depends on the willingness of people like you.
> Do you really see diversity and inclusion departments, speakers and writers declaring success and dissolving their departments and jobs?
Let's just say they will have almost nothing to do any more, similar to the fact there is no longer a need for meetings of the suffragette movement nowadays.
> For instance if white men are over represented as professors, it may seem fair to discriminate until the numbers are equal.
Yes. That seems fair.
> But if you broke the group of white men up into young and old, you'd find it's the young who are being punished for the success of the old.
Nobody is punished for anything. The goal is to help people who are at a systematic disadvantage due to sheer bad luck when they otherwise have the same skills and qualifications.
I'm not saying that relative quotas are the solution to all problems of society, but I do argue they sometimes make sense - within reasonable limits, of course, which are always contestable.
> Suddenly by redrawing the groups it's gone from being fair to unfair.
Yes, there can be cases of trading a local optimum for a better global optimum, and these can create temporary local unfairness. That was the point of my analogy to the role of Pareto optimality in theories of resource distribution. None of these problems are unsolvable. There are only finitely many disadvantaged groups anyway, and the goal is not to create perfect justice, but to improve society a little bit step by step.
> Is it even possible to be fair to groups without being unfair to individuals?
Fairness primarily concerns the state of society.
I believe that what is going on in reality is that the people who attempt to find arguments against fairer treatment of under-represented groups do that very often based on selfish motives. For example, some privileged white male might think he's treated unfairly if an equally qualified woman is hired instead of him because there are not enough female professors in the department. As a white male academic, I understand the personal feeling. I just don't think it's justified upon sincere reflection.
If a group is privileged and at a systematic advantage, members of the group will tend to consciously or subconsciously resist giving up that advantage. But reaching a fairer state of society is not unfair, even if it may feel like that for individuals.
Suffrage is clearly defined, "fair participation has been reached among equally skilled and trained participants" is extremely fuzzy.
Given blank slatism and any difference in outcome, there's an infinite retreat using a "God of the gaps" argument saying any difference must be due to systematic racism.
Even with blank slates it'll never work. If innate ability was equally distributed, but preference is given to a group in university entry, or job opportunities, then that group will have lower innate ability for a level of training or job position. The non-preferenced group would then do better on average!
>> Nobody is punished for anything
In a zero sum game (like competing for a job) giving some an advantage is the same as giving others a disadvantage.
You are suggesting giving someone a penalty, not for something they have done, but because of what group they belong to.
>> privileged white male
Are all advantages unearned privilege?
I chose my mate carefully, worked hard, spent less than I earn and spend time educating my kids. If I give them an advantage in life, should they be handicapped back down to average?
I'm a piece of replicating DNA, and I work hard, delaying gratification so my DNA does well in the future. Society is an artifact built on top of this reality.
Similarly, my ancestors sacrificed for me. They picked mates with care, followed laws, built societies... They both built a society for themselves, and were shaped by that society. All that work to make me do well, and you want to make us all equal? Why bother working hard or sacrificing for the future?
>> members of the group ... resist giving up that advantage
You admit above it can "create temporary local unfairness".
Then you wonder why people resist it! Especially when they disagree that it's temporary!
(Note: Not disagreeing with bringing it into balance quicker, or making statements that it should be done this way)
Might net team productivity per cost be greater with another white marble rather than a red marble due to culture fit even if the individual red marble is better?
This is the classic "equality of outcome" vs "equality of opportunity" debate. Persons who have been disadvantaged by circumstances of their birth (color, nationality, poverty, etc.) have had their opportunities curbed as a result. How do you bring them back at par with their privileged peers?
One simple way is to remove inequalities in opportunity. However this is very hard in practice and does not help those who are already in a bad position.
The other solution is to ensure equality of outcome (make sure your employees are exactly 50% men and 50% women, for example) by setting hiring quotas. As is clear, this will be highly unfair to the advantaged class.
I don't know what is a just solution for this.
The issue I have with that is that is by far the worst inequality is coming from your social class, not your skin color or your gender.
Those quotas are thus trying to transform a social problem into a diversity problem.
Additionally, I prefer policies which attack the source of the problem (social inequality) than the symptoms (hiring). Of course that's harder to do and it cost much more money but that's really solving the problem instead of putting some rubber band onto it.
Economic class has big impact and can be objectively measured.
If we pick 20 marbles (to avoid rounding errors) then you expect to see ten blue, eight red and two white. But you actually see 17 blue, one red and two white. Your processes tell you you've found the best candidates. But statistics tells you that you could probably have done better.
The blue marbles might not be happy about that: they know they're obviously more able to do the work than the red marbles, because they passed all the interviews. Bringing in "less able" red marbles feels like a bad thing. But the key here is that they're not less able to do the work, they're less able to demonstrate they can do the work.
I believe especially the unknown biases are a problem. Many companies don't know why they hire less diverse, so they either deflect it (e.g. by blaming universities) or they introduce quotas. Quotas might be the best thing in this situation but ultimately, only finding and rooting out biases can lead to a truly fair process. Especially since quotas only work in large numbers. Hiring for upper management, in niche roles or in small companies cannot be accomplished fairly with quotas.
Much like the other problems in the article, there's no obvious villain, and it's a long process to change a deeply flawed system.
It's a little exaggerated, or at least what we mostly have/want in practice is 'access to' - since in reality the dad doesn't stand on a box for the sake of it, and he probably holds his smaller child rather than place him precariously on two.
The experiment has shown that, as the system evolves, it doesn't have a stable state. One needs to bolt on additional controls to try to keep it in a stable state, or else one gets concentration of wealth and power. All the symptoms of that are pretty obvious with endless spilled ink. I really don't think this stuff should be controversial to people who are normally thinking about the behavior of complex systems.
What seems to have changed in UK and US politics in recent years is those who have benefitted most from the current system have persuaded those who have most to gain that they’re on the same side.
Previous discussion on hackernews is here [2]
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465446 [2]
In the "reply" for Tim he states both positive and negative things about Amazon. However his main issue is with the monopoly of big tech-giants.
If the original link doesn't open, then you can use the Internet Archive's copy:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200728052705/https://www.tbray...
The bulk of the article laments the reality that the media, writ large, wants to report on “Tim vs Jeff”, not on “wealth inequality is out of control and we need to at least break up tech darlings, maybe much more.”
I guess the article leaves me thinking, so what do you want to do instead? Communist revolution? Anarchist utopia? The article posits that we should break up some specificly named corporations, but doesn't even give a criteria as to why those corps, other than i suppose the author dislikes them. Why them and not others? What's the objective criteria?
Based not only in your comments, I feel that you in the US are really afraid of the socialism and communism that you're not going to progress at all in the direction of such ideologies which care more of the people in general than the specific individual. You have the example of Europe, with several countries with social democratic parties that are doing much better than you in social justice and well being, and still you're with the US cold war mentality. You still think the 'commies' are coming...
With that attitude/mentality I feel you cannot change much.
I agree there are lots of options. The article would be compelling if the author picked an option and argued for it. Vauge negative statements about the status quo that nobody disagrees with are not compelling. Positions that can be defended and argued for/against are.
Anyone can preach to the choir.
I recently got a letter from a centre-right party president reminding everyone about the part of our constitution which says a society is judged by how it treats its weakest members. I believe that'd be considered pinko-commie talk in the states.
Bray left AMZN on 1 May. I gather that date is significant to US people, because he's calling for potential legal reforms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Day_(United_States)
https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/canada/
there's nothing between Yom Ha’Atzmaut and Mothers' Day.
(TIL about "Loyalty Day", but that's also US, now deprecated.)
Since Reagon was president, the US population has grown by 82 Million people (32% increase). At the same time, jobs went to China and so on.
Is it certain that Reagan is to blame, and how? What if poor people just stopped having kids? Why is it assumed that there are good paying jobs for everybody, no matter how many people there are? Where do they come from?
If bad socio economic situation prevented people from making kids, humanity would have been extinct for quite a while.
But some people can't help but have kids, because contraception is either not uniformly applied / accessible, or due to religion prohibiting contraception.
I bet that the lower is one's socioeconomic status, the harder it is to control childbirth, just because it's expensive. So even if having (one more) child would make life obviously hard(er) for the parent(s) and the child alike, there can just be not enough money to prevent it.
I think usually society regulates itself that way: people who prosper have kids. Because their parents are in a booming field of work, it is likely that there will also be work for their kids. Sometimes there are shifts in economics (for example coal mining going out of fashion), and millions suddenly are without a job. The economy can "buffer" some of that, but not arbitrarily high numbers.
I suppose in the past this was even more obvious, as it was directly food based. I suppose as long as there was more land to convert to farmland, having kids always worked out - if they survived, they could start new farms and repeat the cycle.
There are different strategies, like having as many kids as possible and hoping that some make it.
Nobody is "structuring society" in a cruel way, it is bottom up, individual decisions by people.
No they don't - not in modern industrial societies. Please look at the data.
Modern societies also have a precipitously declining fertility rate.
That's the line of thinking that leads to an abundance of low-skill, low-pay jobs and a shortage in skilled workers, where needed. Skill and education are not produced overnight to fit the market needs. They are a long-term investment by the individual and the society.
> I think usually society regulates itself that way: people who prosper have kids. Because their parents are in a booming field of work, it is likely that there will also be work for their kids. Sometimes there are shifts in economics (for example coal mining going out of fashion), and millions suddenly are without a job. The economy can "buffer" some of that, but not arbitrarily high numbers.
So the answer to society's problems is nepotism instead of meritocracy and equal opportunities. That's a good one!
> I suppose in the past this was even more obvious, as it was directly food based. I suppose as long as there was more land to convert to farmland, having kids always worked out - if they survived, they could start new farms and repeat the cycle. > There are different strategies, like having as many kids as possible and hoping that some make it.
Civilization has always been about relieving people from the stress of having to devise a survival strategy. That's a waste of manpower from a societal standpoint. A society is made weaker by having more people struggling for the livelihood of themselves and their family.
Moreover, having as many kids as possible was a strategy for a time when wars, famine and disease ravaged the population and the earth was sparsely populated. It's a stupid strategy today, unless you advocate massive depopulation and returning to a global state of human misery.
> Nobody is "structuring society" in a cruel way, it is bottom up, individual decisions by people.
Societies can be structured and are structured. That's the essence of society. Even letting society unregulated is essentially structuring it in favour of the groups that happen to hold power. And this is just one logical step away from racist theories: If your group is prospering for too long while other groups live in misery, it's only a matter of time to self-declare it as superior, conveniently ignoring that society was rigged in your favour.
It pretty much is guaranteed because that is how we structured our economic system. Why do think we have inflation? Inflation reduces the value of our assets and forces us to work just to stay where we are. It forces rich people to productively invest their assets. It forces poor people to spend their money as quickly as possible. This accelerates the economy an creates new jobs. Low un(der)employment is a policy goal of many governments and controlled inflation is a tool used to achieve that goal.
With all respect: That is one of the most disgusting, social-darwinist takes I have ever read on HN. The freedom of reproduction is seen as a basic human right across many jurisdictions - the positive freedom (i.e. the freedom to have a child) definitely, the negative freedom (i.e. the freedom to prevent reproduction by contraception or abortion) unfortunately mostly in the secular Western world.
Telling poor people that they should not have children is something we saw the last time in action in the Nazi dictatorship in Germany in the Western world (and in the Communist world in China until a few years ago). This is a genie that should never ever be let back out of the bottle.
The jobs come from our ability to be creative and find ways to improve each others lives. More people on Earth means more people to provide for and more people to provide.
Anyway, I wasn't there but IIRC Reagan started diplomatic talks with China and American billionaires have been shipping jobs overseas ever since.
This is a direct result of policies that began in Reagan and Thatcher's era. Deng saw at that time that the West is now led by profiteers rather than statesmen, and honed his pitch perfectly.
You mentioned that "jobs went to China" but the way economics works is that if you keep exporting goods and maintain a trade imbalance your currency will get stronger until there is no trade imbalance anymore. This would mean that eventually the Chinese will be paid just as much as Americans and American labor costs would be competitive again. The Chinese growth phase will be remembered as a blip in history.
Your strategy would be highly suboptimal. Consider the fact that the vast majority of our ancestors were poorer than us. Should they have had no children? It's so easy to just point at things humans are naturally inclined to do and then criticize them for being human. Having children might be expensive but if everyone had to guarantee 18 years of no economic misfortune before one can have a child then the human race would have died out after a single generation because nobody can make that guarantee. This is just some pipe dream so that richer people believe they will never be poor.
Language like that discredits the whole article as a hysterical piece.
In any case, oil extractors are in business only because ordinary people want gasoline to drive their cars.
As a general rule, people use such phrases to cover for a weak, poorly argued case. It's a tell.
It's like what a lawyer told me once:
1. If the law is on your side, argue the law.
2. If justice is on your side, argue for justice.
3. If neither the law nor justice is on your side, call the other party names.
Yet I did read the whole article, and found it weak and poorly argued. His specific point about vomit was also weak and poorly argued, as I pointed out.
A word to the wise - if you want thoughtful people to read an article, don't use such phrases. I'm hardly the only person to point this out.
He did it repeatedly in the article.
> why his post was poorly argued
I pointed out that he neglected to account for why the oil companies existed - because people want gasoline. It isn't the oil companies emitting CO2, it's the gas consumers.
Thoughtful people can forgive some logical transgressions, especially when a growing subset of society see contributing to the supply of carbon as immoral. I personally do not, being an Albertan... however, it is a very common position in British Columbia, where Tim lives.
Subjects as big as these should not end up as "personal responsibility" of the consumers. Especially when suppliers hold all the cards.
> suppliers hold all the cards
Hardly. I chose to not do drugs. Drug suppliers have no hold over me.
I can say based on a lifetime of experience if you want reasonable and influential people to shut their ears to you, use incendiary language. And the reason is simple - the strong correlation between an emotional appeal and a lousy argument.
You don't have to believe me, but I encourage you from now on to pay attention to the language used and the strength of the argument.
Really? That is hyperbolic to me, and I was not as interested in reading the rest of his article after that.
That's a shame because if you had continue reading you could have judged if it was really hyperbolic or if there was some truth to it.
Besides why even care about some of the conclusions in the piece if you can also absorb the information and form your own conclusions?
The language "is in danger of breaking" is frankly dialed down because he is obviously self-conscious about sounding like some wild-eyed radical. The fact is, if this trend isn't checked, there certainly will be a violent break down, which is a corresponding trend that is also growing before our very eyes in the form of BLM protests and the corresponding government response.
Violence is not condoned in our society. Therefore, it follows that manifestations of violence are a form of breakage. If such manifestations erupt directly from power/wealth/legal disparities, I'd say Bray's language is a rather mild flavor of perfectly accurate.
PG literally wrote an essay about it. http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html (not sure if it is the one I meant, but it touches on many of the subjects here. Including the "pie fallacy")
In that light, it is more surprising that so many people on HN are in favor of socialism.
Besides, what's the use of being a billionaire if you can't enjoy a night out on the town without fear of being robbed and killed by the jealous proles?
Note this does not imply socialism or expanding safety nets -- I was thinking more of very progressive taxes that fund public infrastructure, green energy, public transportation, public parks and water catchments, the kind of thing that makes the world better for everyone - rich folk inclusive.
Regarding the winners being undeserved: 1. It can be shown that just using chance (or slightly unequal starting conditions) simple economic systems develop into a state where there is one player who essentially owns all (I linked to the article earlier [1]). So yes it can be just chance. 2. Once the winners have sufficient power they will game the system in their favour. There's lots of evidence for this, just look at the Panama papers for example.
That’s one possibility, the other is that productivity has no bounds and increased efficiency just means further productivity, not a lessening of work to achieve the same productivity as before.
If those 100 people can’t afford things like health care and housing, they have been crushed.
I’m not arguing socialism v. capitalism. I’m simply pointing out that a trend of widening inequality leads to deep systemic problems, and is not sustainable. We can correct it without gasp socialism. Laws, regulation, and political finance reform are likely sufficient.
I don't read either of those in the comment you're responding to.
Your response is so disconnected from what I wrote I can barely understand it as such.
Our laws prohibit all forms of violence domestically, do they not? Those are the explicit rules of our society. Whatever else you are referring to, it seems less relevant than that.
Recent violent upticks with protestors v. police/military are a fact, and are relevant here. Do you think that all of this is indicative of a productive society? Destroyed police stations and dead/wounded protestors?
It warrants an adjustment. We must try to fix the root cause, because the cost of all of this is too high. For everyone.
I'm not sure I agree with the rest of the article; it made some bad points and some good ones. And I certainly don't think it's clear that the fabric of society is in danger of breaking for the exact reasons the author listed, and that this can be solved by adoption the exact solutions the author advocates for. (Again, I'm not saying it's not true, just that I remain unconvinced.)
But...
...it's pretty god damn clear that the fabric of society is in danger of breaking down, certainly in the context of the US, and arguably in the context of the West as a whole.
Glance at the news, fill in your own list: Covid, antivaxxers, Portland, deficits, pension crisis at state and local government level, the increasing partisan divide, the collapse of the business models of traditional media, rampant conspiracy theories, BLM riots, anti-protect violence from the police, the balkanization of the news people consume, Trump, collapsing trust in institutions, increasing politicization of the courts, the stunning lack of Senate confirmed appointees in the current administration, etc., we could go on. At some point we're going to get a Covid vaccine, and we're going to need to launch a massive nation-wide vaccination campaign, but in the current climate literally everything is partisan, a decent chunk of the population has convinced themselves Covid is a hoax, people are resorting to violence when asked to wear a mask. How's that vaccination campaign going to go? Meanwhile the economy is lurching towwards a cliff. When Covid hit the US, it was at the end of the longest economic expansion in US history, but rather than store up resources for the inevitable contraction, the US was running unprecedented deficits. Now Covid has hit; what happens next? Especially if societal dysfunction prevents a coordinated response? And so on, and so forth.
I mean, obviously everything could be fine, but if your concern is that "the fabric of society is in danger of breaking" is just too hyperbolic, I think you need to open your eyes. You can point fingers where you like (and we do, which is a big part of the problem!) but regardless of who is to blame, things are not good.
That's the point of "the news" though: to keep you engaged by providing a daily crisis for you to worry about, because that makes you watch thew news. If one crisis goes away, or viewers get bored of it, a new one pops up and the old one is gone. Remember how we were supposedly "this close" to ww3 in February or March because of Iran?
Monster Of The Week Shows need monsters or they lose their audience.
It could just be me growing older and/or the news that I'm consuming becoming more globally focused. But are you really suggesting that 20 years ago we had issues comparable to the US giving up on pandemic response, to BLM, to impending climate catastrophe and rising fascism everywhere in the world?
Just that the headlines in the news always have the same font size doesn't mean that the news is always equally dramatic. This goes both ways.
(1) A global pandemic.
(2) A massive protest movement.
(3) The wake of what will soon be millions of evictions, not to mention the current unemployment rate and the effects we're seeing on wealth inequality.
(4) On the inevitable track of climate change displacing tens of millions to hundreds of millions of people. This branch will also lead to some supply-chain and food management issues I cannot even fathom.
(5) A concerning increase in polarization and even fascism. Increasing distrust in science and decreasing certainty in our news sources.
Just off the top of my head.
People don't innovate by themselves. The workers and/or engineers of the US or the world could have pooled their money and built AWS or space rockets, or electric cars. But they haven't. It takes money and actions from few people to get stuff done.
Governments can create and fund programs to do these large-scale projects. They can also leave it to private industry to do so as well, but with strong protections for workers, the unions they may want to form, and the living conditions of all participants (employee, supplier, miner, etc.), domestic and foreign.
Space rockets - done before by the state. Commercialising it is disruption.
Electric cars - done before and lost in the market due to battery tech (lithium tech research has been funded also publicaly)
AWS - co-opting open source software and turning it into a service isn't exactly innovation. But scaling it up to such a degrees is market disruption.
You don't need huge amount of capital to be innovative, people naturally are. But you need a system to roll-out innovations and when you do this at scale, it becomes disruptive. VC and tech giant funding brings this forward but societal change is mainly driven by technology, not by capital.