Comment by gnarbarian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnarbarian | Hacker News Reader

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tldr: read "shop craft is soul craft"

in theory it could have been solved by a more competitive market.

I believe most shortfalls in our current market economy stem from a lack of competition and then subsequent cartel style collusion for the few big players, high barriers to entry that are fortified through regulatory capture, and a tendency for lots of small players in tight competition to consolidate over time into fewer bigger players. (I think we need to disincentiveze consolidation in all but the most egregious cases of natural monopolies like most public utilities)

this answers so many questions from "why is it so hard to work on my new car" to "why do my tennis shoes wear out so fast".

there are also cultural factors. people using the tools aren't the same craftsmen who build, repair, and sell them. each of these disciplines is now siloed and few companies are putting real effort into considering this holistic lifecycle view of their products.

then when these options do exist people may not be aware, or obtaining them is more immediately expensive or less convenient in the short term. or they simply don't care.

> I believe most shortfalls in our current market economy stem from a lack of competition

That set of problem is indeed enormous. I'm not arguing otherwise. But there is also an enormous set of problems that can't be solved by more competition, but people put forth "more competition" as a solution anyway.

Increasing competition is valuable, but it's not a panacea.

I'm far from convinced that this particular problem can be solved by more competition for a few reasons, but the primary one is this: the established players have shown that behaving this way will maximize profit. New players in the space have a greater economic pressure to do the same than to do differently.

Can you give a good example of a market problem that can’t be solved through increased competition?

Reducing rectivism with for-profit prisons. Society can agree that's a good goal, but the prisons make more profit the more people are in prisons. People in prison don't have to paid minimum wage and have fewer constitutional rights and would rather work sewing clothes for a corporation or whatever than be assigned worse jobs. Having more for-profit prisons just drives down wages and reduces costs and does nothing for recidivism because the incentives just aren't there. Anywhere the incentives just aren't there, more competion isn't going to help things and may make things worse.

Any problem involving externalities rather than monopoly.

There many that are! An interesting question is if increased competition (from the same competitors) comes at the hand of government regulation. Let's say for product X there are competitors A and B. They're not really actively competing, and in fact, have divided the market up between them. Then along comes the government, and says "Hey you two (John Deere and Caterpillar, or Apple and Google), you've formed a duopoly", and pushes some regulation (say, right to repair, or 3rd party app stores) on them.

I'm reminded of when Boba exploded in popularity. The story goes there was one store in the food court, then it got super popular, so then there were five stores, but there wasn't the market to support five of them in the same food court, so then they all folded. There was a market for one of those stores. Increased competition split the market up too much so there weren't enough sales to sustain any stores, leading to a failure of the market to maintain a Boba store in a food court that's able to sustain one.

How many more competitors (factories) do you need to see before it becomes painfully obvious that businesses don't and won't care about global warming unless it becomes material to their bottom line? (Or they're companies who's executives believe in that mission, eg Patagonia).

I think the very problem we're talking about is a good example. If the John Deere's of the world are doing this, then any competitor will also have to do this in order to compete with them. So competition won't fix it.

If people want repairable tractors so bad why aren't they willing to pay for it?

John Deere has a number of (large) competitors, Caterpillar being the largest. But hey, guess what, Caterpillar's not so big on right to repair either. There are a number of smaller brands in that market as well, some of them do support repairability in order to compete with John Deere, but the worry is if they're even going to be around in 15 years.

Thing is, farmers already have their John Deere tractors, and, just like Apple sucks you into their ecosystem and soon every tech thing you own is an Apple product, so does John Deere. The switching cost is just too high, especially for a whole farm's equipment that you buy and keep/use for 15 years. The first iphone is just older than that. So you buy a tractor in 2008, it's only just now time to replace that tractor, but in the interim you've bought all of the special dongles, at $50k-$300k a pop, are you really going to switch tractor manufacturers? You could, we're talking about farm equipment, not mini DVI dongles, but you really want your hardware to work together, and it's going to take you another 15 years to fully divest yourself of the Apple, err John Deere ecosystem. But you're already 40, having inherited the family farm when you were 25. Another 15 years and you'll be 55, and it'll be time for retirement soon enough. So you just keep buying John Deere products and hope the corporate farms don't get you before then.

I know government regulations are anathema to some, but they're anathema because they really do force somebody's hand, and change things. Sometimes, even for good.

It's not at all clear that they aren't.

Based on evidence presented, this one we're talking about right now wasn't.

Sure, but nobody is explaining why. I assume people simply don’t understand it properly.

I think I did, in this very thread.

> shortfalls in our current market economy

and

> market problem

are two different classes of problems.

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