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Javier E

Is Amazon Creating a Cultural Monopoly? - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...n-creating-a-cultural-monopoly

amazon culture diversity monopoly antitrust

shared by Javier E on 24 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • “We are not experts in antitrust law, and this letter is not a legal brief. But we are authors with a deep, collective experience in this field, and we agree with the authorities in economics and law who have asserted that Amazon’s dominant position makes it a monopoly as a seller of books and a monopsony as a buyer of books.” (A monopoly is a company that has extraordinary control over supply as a seller of goods to consumers; a monopsony has extraordinary control over suppliers as a buyer of their goods.)
  • a highly unorthodox argument: that, even though Amazon’s activities tend to reduce book prices, which is considered good for consumers, they ultimately hurt consumers
  • U.S. courts evaluate antitrust issues very differently, nowadays, than they did a hundred years ago, just after antitrust laws were established to keep big corporations from abusing their power. Back then, judges tended to be largely concerned with protecting suppliers from being squeezed by retailers, which meant that, if a corporation exercised monopoly power to push prices down, hurting suppliers, the company could easily lose an antitrust case. But by the nineteen-eighties, the judiciary’s focus had shifted to protecting consumers, leading courts to become more prone to ruling in favor of the corporation, on the grounds that lower prices are good for consumers.
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  • specific argument—that Amazon’s actions are bad for consumers because they make our world less intellectually active and diverse—is unorthodox in its resort to cultural and artistic grounds. But it can be read as the inverse of a case like Leegin v. PSKS: that lower prices for worse products could be bad for consumers—and perhaps constitute an antitrust violation.
  • if higher prices corresponded with better products, that could be good for consumers—and not necessarily an antitrust violation.
  • Their argument is this: Amazon has used its market power both to influence which books get attention (by featuring them more prominently on its Web site, a practice I’ve also written about) and, in some cases, to drive prices lower. These practices, the authors argue, squeeze publishers, which makes them more risk-averse in deciding which books to publish. As a result, they claim, publishers have been “dropping some midlist authors and not publishing certain riskier books, effectively silencing many voices.” And this is bad not only for the non-famous writers who go unpublished, but for their would-be readers, who are denied the ability to hear those voices.
  • While it may be attractive, on a philosophical level, to argue that Amazon is bad for us because it makes our culture poorer, measuring that effect would be difficult, if not impossible. How would one go about valuing an unpublished masterpiece by an unknown author? This is further complicated by the fact that Amazon makes it easy for authors to self-publish and have their work be seen, without having to go through such traditional gatekeepers as agents and publishers; Amazon might argue that this allows for more free flow of information and ideas
  • Furthermore, U.S. law is concerned with diversity in media, Crane said, but that tends to be regulated through the Federal Communications Commission, not the Justice Department.
  • it’s quite possible the Justice Department will read the Authors United letter and dismiss it as uninformed. But even if that happens, Preston said, it will have been worthwhile for the writers to have made their case.
  • Authors United’s larger mission, he told me, was this: “We hope to show the public that getting products faster and cheaper isn’t necessarily the greatest good. It comes at a human cost.”
jlessner

Europe Challenges Google, Seeing Violations of Its Antitrust Law - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ion-google-antitrust-case.html

europe challenges google antitrust law bias

shared by jlessner on 16 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • The European Union’s antitrust chief on Wednesday formally accused Google of abusing its dominance in web searches, bringing charges that could limit the giant American tech company’s moneymaking prowess.
  • It will almost certainly increase pressure on Google to address complaints that the company favors its own products in search results over its rivals’ services.
  • “If the investigation confirmed our concerns, Google would have to face the legal consequences and change the way it does business in Europe,” said Ms. Vestager, the European Union’s competition commissioner, referring to Google’s search practices.
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  • Google holds a roughly 90 percent share in the region’s search market, and the company contends that in both web searches and Android software it plays fair.
Javier E

Big Tech Has Become Way Too Powerful - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...h-too-powerful-ask-google.html

politics conservative liberal technology research free market government

shared by Javier E on 21 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • CONSERVATIVES and liberals interminably debate the merits of “the free market” versus “the government.
  • The important question, too rarely discussed, is who has the most influence over these decisions and in that way wins the game.
  • Now information and ideas are the most valuable forms of property. Most of the cost of producing it goes into discovering it or making the first copy. After that, the additional production cost is often zero. Such “intellectual property” is the key building block of the new economy
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  • as has happened before with other forms of property, the most politically influential owners of the new property are doing their utmost to increase their profits by creating monopolies
  • The most valuable intellectual properties are platforms so widely used that everyone else has to use them, too. Think of standard operating systems like Microsoft’s Windows or Google’s Android; Google’s search engine; Amazon’s shopping system; and Facebook’s communication network
  • Despite an explosion in the number of websites over the last decade, page views are becoming more concentrated. While in 2001, the top 10 websites accounted for 31 percent of all page views in America, by 2010 the top 10 accounted for 75 percent
  • Amazon is now the first stop for almost a third of all American consumers seeking to buy anything
  • Google and Facebook are now the first stops for many Americans seeking news — while Internet traffic to much of the nation’s newspapers, network television and other news gathering agencies has fallen well below 50 percent of all traffic.
  • almost all of the profits go to the platforms’ owners, who have all of the bargaining power
  • The rate at which new businesses have formed in the United States has slowed markedly since the late 1970s. Big Tech’s sweeping patents, standard platforms, fleets of lawyers to litigate against potential rivals and armies of lobbyists have created formidable barriers to new entrants
  • The law gives 20 years of patent protection to inventions that are “new and useful,” as decided by the Patent and Trademark Office. But the winners are big enough to game the system. They make small improvements warranting new patents, effectively making their intellectual property semipermanent.
  • They also lay claim to whole terrains of potential innovation including ideas barely on drawing boards and flood the system with so many applications that lone inventors have to wait years.
  • Big Tech has been almost immune to serious antitrust scrutiny, even though the largest tech companies have more market power than ever. Maybe that’s because they’ve accumulated so much political power.
  • Economic and political power can’t be separated because dominant corporations gain political influence over how markets are maintained and enforced, which enlarges their economic power further. One of the original goals of antitrust law was to prevent this.
  • We are now in a new gilded age similar to the first Gilded Age, when the nation’s antitrust laws were enacted. As then, those with great power and resources are making the “free market” function on their behalf. Big Tech — along with the drug, insurance, agriculture and financial giants — dominates both our economy and our politics.
  • The real question is how government organizes the market, and who has the most influence over its decisions
  • Yet as long as we remain obsessed by the debate over the relative merits of the “free market” and “government,” we have little hope of seeing what’s occurring and taking the action that’s needed to make our economy work for the many, not the few.
katherineharron

Trump threatens to crack down on social media platforms after Twitter labels his tweets... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 27 May 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump on Wednesday threatened to "strongly regulate" or even shut down social media platforms after Twitter applied a fact-check to two of his tweets this week.
  • "Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen," Trump tweeted Wednesday
  • Trump's Twitter outburst followed an unprecedented decision by the platform on Tuesday evening to apply a fact-checking label to Trump's content for the first time.
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  • Shortly after the labels were applied, Trump took to Twitter to claim the company "is interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election" and "stifling FREE SPEECH." He added that he "will not allow it to happen!"
  • "The Radical Left is in total command & control of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google," and promised, without specifics, that his administration would "remedy this illegal situation."
  • Meanwhile, major tech industry players remain under federal and state antitrust investigation. But antitrust probes tend to be highly technical and are usually limited to the impact of corporate conduct on competition in the marketplace.
Javier E

The Economic Case for Regulating Social Media - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...media-facebook-regulation.html

social media network economics conspiracy theory hate speech addiction platform ad-financed business model click-bait psychology technology

shared by Javier E on 15 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter generate revenue by using detailed behavioral information to direct ads to individual users.
  • this bland description of their business model fails to convey even a hint of its profound threat to the nation’s political and social stability.
  • legislators in Congress to propose the breakup of some tech firms, along with other traditional antitrust measures. But the main hazard posed by these platforms is not aggressive pricing, abusive service or other ills often associated with monopoly.
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  • Instead, it is their contribution to the spread of misinformation, hate speech and conspiracy theories.
  • digital platforms, since the marginal cost of serving additional consumers is essentially zero. Because the initial costs of producing a platform’s content are substantial, and because any company’s first goal is to remain solvent, it cannot just give stuff away. Even so, when price exceeds marginal cost, competition relentlessly pressures rival publishers to cut prices — eventually all the way to zero. This, in a nutshell, is the publisher’s dilemma in the digital age.
  • These firms make money not by charging for access to content but by displaying it with finely targeted ads based on the specific types of things people have already chosen to view. If the conscious intent were to undermine social and political stability, this business model could hardly be a more effective weapon.
  • The algorithms that choose individual-specific content are crafted to maximize the time people spend on a platform
  • As the developers concede, Facebook’s algorithms are addictive by design and exploit negative emotional triggers. Platform addiction drives earnings, and hate speech, lies and conspiracy theories reliably boost addiction.
  • the subscription model isn’t fully efficient: Any positive fee would inevitably exclude at least some who would value access but not enough to pay the fee
  • a conservative think tank, says, for example, that government has no business second-guessing people’s judgments about what to post or read on social media.
  • That position would be easier to defend in a world where individual choices had no adverse impact on others. But negative spillover effects are in fact quite common
  • individual and collective incentives about what to post or read on social media often diverge sharply.
  • There is simply no presumption that what spreads on these platforms best serves even the individual’s own narrow interests, much less those of society as a whole.
  • a simpler step may hold greater promise: Platforms could be required to abandon that model in favor of one relying on subscriptions, whereby members gain access to content in return for a modest recurring fee.
  • Major newspapers have done well under this model, which is also making inroads in book publishing. The subscription model greatly weakens the incentive to offer algorithmically driven addictive content provided by individuals, editorial boards or other sources.
  • Careful studies have shown that Facebook’s algorithms have increased political polarization significantly
  • More worrisome, those excluded would come disproportionately from low-income groups. Such objections might be addressed specifically — perhaps with a modest tax credit to offset subscription fees — or in a more general way, by making the social safety net more generous.
  • Adam Smith, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher widely considered the father of economics, is celebrated for his “invisible hand” theory, which describes conditions under which market incentives promote socially benign outcomes. Many of his most ardent admirers may view steps to constrain the behavior of social media platforms as regulatory overreach.
  • But Smith’s remarkable insight was actually more nuanced: Market forces often promote society’s welfare, but not always. Indeed, as he saw clearly, individual interests are often squarely at odds with collective aspirations, and in many such instances it is in society’s interest to intervene. The current information crisis is a case in point.
Javier E

George Packer: Is Amazon Bad for Books? : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...140217fa_fact_packer

book industry Amazon

shared by Javier E on 03 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Amazon is a global superstore, like Walmart. It’s also a hardware manufacturer, like Apple, and a utility, like Con Edison, and a video distributor, like Netflix, and a book publisher, like Random House, and a production studio, like Paramount, and a literary magazine, like The Paris Review, and a grocery deliverer, like FreshDirect, and someday it might be a package service, like U.P.S. Its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, also owns a major newspaper, the Washington Post. All these streams and tributaries make Amazon something radically new in the history of American business
  • Amazon is not just the “Everything Store,” to quote the title of Brad Stone’s rich chronicle of Bezos and his company; it’s more like the Everything. What remains constant is ambition, and the search for new things to be ambitious about.
  • It wasn’t a love of books that led him to start an online bookstore. “It was totally based on the property of books as a product,” Shel Kaphan, Bezos’s former deputy, says. Books are easy to ship and hard to break, and there was a major distribution warehouse in Oregon. Crucially, there are far too many books, in and out of print, to sell even a fraction of them at a physical store. The vast selection made possible by the Internet gave Amazon its initial advantage, and a wedge into selling everything else.
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  • it’s impossible to know for sure, but, according to one publisher’s estimate, book sales in the U.S. now make up no more than seven per cent of the company’s roughly seventy-five billion dollars in annual revenue.
  • A monopoly is dangerous because it concentrates so much economic power, but in the book business the prospect of a single owner of both the means of production and the modes of distribution is especially worrisome: it would give Amazon more control over the exchange of ideas than any company in U.S. history.
  • “The key to understanding Amazon is the hiring process,” one former employee said. “You’re not hired to do a particular job—you’re hired to be an Amazonian. Lots of managers had to take the Myers-Briggs personality tests. Eighty per cent of them came in two or three similar categories, and Bezos is the same: introverted, detail-oriented, engineer-type personality. Not musicians, designers, salesmen. The vast majority fall within the same personality type—people who graduate at the top of their class at M.I.T. and have no idea what to say to a woman in a bar.”
  • According to Marcus, Amazon executives considered publishing people “antediluvian losers with rotary phones and inventory systems designed in 1968 and warehouses full of crap.” Publishers kept no data on customers, making their bets on books a matter of instinct rather than metrics. They were full of inefficiences, starting with overpriced Manhattan offices.
  • For a smaller house, Amazon’s total discount can go as high as sixty per cent, which cuts deeply into already slim profit margins. Because Amazon manages its inventory so well, it often buys books from small publishers with the understanding that it can’t return them, for an even deeper discount
  • According to one insider, around 2008—when the company was selling far more than books, and was making twenty billion dollars a year in revenue, more than the combined sales of all other American bookstores—Amazon began thinking of content as central to its business. Authors started to be considered among the company’s most important customers. By then, Amazon had lost much of the market in selling music and videos to Apple and Netflix, and its relations with publishers were deteriorating
  • In its drive for profitability, Amazon did not raise retail prices; it simply squeezed its suppliers harder, much as Walmart had done with manufacturers. Amazon demanded ever-larger co-op fees and better shipping terms; publishers knew that they would stop being favored by the site’s recommendation algorithms if they didn’t comply. Eventually, they all did.
  • Brad Stone describes one campaign to pressure the most vulnerable publishers for better terms: internally, it was known as the Gazelle Project, after Bezos suggested “that Amazon should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.”
  • ithout dropping co-op fees entirely, Amazon simplified its system: publishers were asked to hand over a percentage of their previous year’s sales on the site, as “marketing development funds.”
  • The figure keeps rising, though less for the giant pachyderms than for the sickly gazelles. According to the marketing executive, the larger houses, which used to pay two or three per cent of their net sales through Amazon, now relinquish five to seven per cent of gross sales, pushing Amazon’s percentage discount on books into the mid-fifties. Random House currently gives Amazon an effective discount of around fifty-three per cent.
  • In December, 1999, at the height of the dot-com mania, Time named Bezos its Person of the Year. “Amazon isn’t about technology or even commerce,” the breathless cover article announced. “Amazon is, like every other site on the Web, a content play.” Yet this was the moment, Marcus said, when “content” people were “on the way out.”
  • By 2010, Amazon controlled ninety per cent of the market in digital books—a dominance that almost no company, in any industry, could claim. Its prohibitively low prices warded off competition
  • In 2004, he set up a lab in Silicon Valley that would build Amazon’s first piece of consumer hardware: a device for reading digital books. According to Stone’s book, Bezos told the executive running the project, “Proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.”
  • Lately, digital titles have levelled off at about thirty per cent of book sales.
  • The literary agent Andrew Wylie (whose firm represents me) says, “What Bezos wants is to drag the retail price down as low as he can get it—a dollar-ninety-nine, even ninety-nine cents. That’s the Apple play—‘What we want is traffic through our device, and we’ll do anything to get there.’ ” If customers grew used to paying just a few dollars for an e-book, how long before publishers would have to slash the cover price of all their titles?
  • As Apple and the publishers see it, the ruling ignored the context of the case: when the key events occurred, Amazon effectively had a monopoly in digital books and was selling them so cheaply that it resembled predatory pricing—a barrier to entry for potential competitors. Since then, Amazon’s share of the e-book market has dropped, levelling off at about sixty-five per cent, with the rest going largely to Apple and to Barnes & Noble, which sells the Nook e-reader. In other words, before the feds stepped in, the agency model introduced competition to the market
  • But the court’s decision reflected a trend in legal thinking among liberals and conservatives alike, going back to the seventies, that looks at antitrust cases from the perspective of consumers, not producers: what matters is lowering prices, even if that goal comes at the expense of competition. Barry Lynn, a market-policy expert at the New America Foundation, said, “It’s one of the main factors that’s led to massive consolidation.”
  • Publishers sometimes pass on this cost to authors, by redefining royalties as a percentage of the publisher’s receipts, not of the book’s list price. Recently, publishers say, Amazon began demanding an additional payment, amounting to approximately one per cent of net sales
  • brick-and-mortar retailers employ forty-seven people for every ten million dollars in revenue earned; Amazon employs fourteen.
  • Since the arrival of the Kindle, the tension between Amazon and the publishers has become an open battle. The conflict reflects not only business antagonism amid technological change but a division between the two coasts, with different cultural styles and a philosophical disagreement about what techies call “disruption.”
  • Bezos told Charlie Rose, “Amazon is not happening to bookselling. The future is happening to bookselling.”
  • n Grandinetti’s view, the Kindle “has helped the book business make a more orderly transition to a mixed print and digital world than perhaps any other medium.” Compared with people who work in music, movies, and newspapers, he said, authors are well positioned to thrive. The old print world of scarcity—with a limited number of publishers and editors selecting which manuscripts to publish, and a limited number of bookstores selecting which titles to carry—is yielding to a world of digital abundance. Grandinetti told me that, in these new circumstances, a publisher’s job “is to build a megaphone.”
  • it offers an extremely popular self-publishing platform. Authors become Amazon partners, earning up to seventy per cent in royalties, as opposed to the fifteen per cent that authors typically make on hardcovers. Bezos touts the biggest successes, such as Theresa Ragan, whose self-published thrillers and romances have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. But one survey found that half of all self-published authors make less than five hundred dollars a year.
  • The business term for all this clear-cutting is “disintermediation”: the elimination of the “gatekeepers,” as Bezos calls the professionals who get in the customer’s way. There’s a populist inflection to Amazon’s propaganda, an argument against élitist institutions and for “the democratization of the means of production”—a common line of thought in the West Coast tech world
  • “Book publishing is a very human business, and Amazon is driven by algorithms and scale,” Sargent told me. When a house gets behind a new book, “well over two hundred people are pushing your book all over the place, handing it to people, talking about it. A mass of humans, all in one place, generating tremendous energy—that’s the magic potion of publishing. . . . That’s pretty hard to replicate in Amazon’s publishing world, where they have hundreds of thousands of titles.”
  • By producing its own original work, Amazon can sell more devices and sign up more Prime members—a major source of revenue. While the company was building the
  • Like the publishing venture, Amazon Studios set out to make the old “gatekeepers”—in this case, Hollywood agents and executives—obsolete. “We let the data drive what to put in front of customers,” Carr told the Wall Street Journal. “We don’t have tastemakers deciding what our customers should read, listen to, and watch.”
  • book publishers have been consolidating for several decades, under the ownership of media conglomerates like News Corporation, which squeeze them for profits, or holding companies such as Rivergroup, which strip them to service debt. The effect of all this corporatization, as with the replacement of independent booksellers by superstores, has been to privilege the blockbuster.
  • The combination of ceaseless innovation and low-wage drudgery makes Amazon the epitome of a successful New Economy company. It’s hiring as fast as it can—nearly thirty thousand employees last year.
  • the long-term outlook is discouraging. This is partly because Americans don’t read as many books as they used to—they are too busy doing other things with their devices—but also because of the relentless downward pressure on prices that Amazon enforces.
  • he digital market is awash with millions of barely edited titles, most of it dreck, while r
  • Amazon believes that its approach encourages ever more people to tell their stories to ever more people, and turns writers into entrepreneurs; the price per unit might be cheap, but the higher number of units sold, and the accompanying royalties, will make authors wealthier
  • In Friedman’s view, selling digital books at low prices will democratize reading: “What do you want as an author—to sell books to as few people as possible for as much as possible, or for as little as possible to as many readers as possible?”
  • The real talent, the people who are writers because they happen to be really good at writing—they aren’t going to be able to afford to do it.”
  • Seven-figure bidding wars still break out over potential blockbusters, even though these battles often turn out to be follies. The quest for publishing profits in an economy of scarcity drives the money toward a few big books. So does the gradual disappearance of book reviewers and knowledgeable booksellers, whose enthusiasm might have rescued a book from drowning in obscurity. When consumers are overwhelmed with choices, some experts argue, they all tend to buy the same well-known thing.
  • These trends point toward what the literary agent called “the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer.” A few brand names at the top, a mass of unwashed titles down below, the middle hollowed out: the book business in the age of Amazon mirrors the widening inequality of the broader economy.
  • “If they did, in my opinion they would save the industry. They’d lose thirty per cent of their sales, but they would have an additional thirty per cent for every copy they sold, because they’d be selling directly to consumers. The industry thinks of itself as Procter & Gamble*. What gave publishers the idea that this was some big goddam business? It’s not—it’s a tiny little business, selling to a bunch of odd people who read.”
  • Bezos is right: gatekeepers are inherently élitist, and some of them have been weakened, in no small part, because of their complacency and short-term thinking. But gatekeepers are also barriers against the complete commercialization of ideas, allowing new talent the time to develop and learn to tell difficult truths. When the last gatekeeper but one is gone, will Amazon care whether a book is any good? ♦
Javier E

Why Silicon Valley can't fix itself | News | The Guardian - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...-cant-fix-itself-tech-humanism

culture social media technology design power health human nature inequality

shared by Javier E on 20 May 18 - No Cached
  • After decades of rarely apologising for anything, Silicon Valley suddenly seems to be apologising for everything. They are sorry about the trolls. They are sorry about the bots. They are sorry about the fake news and the Russians, and the cartoons that are terrifying your kids on YouTube. But they are especially sorry about our brains.
  • Sean Parker, the former president of Facebook – who was played by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network – has publicly lamented the “unintended consequences” of the platform he helped create: “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
  • Parker, Rosenstein and the other insiders now talking about the harms of smartphones and social media belong to an informal yet influential current of tech critics emerging within Silicon Valley. You could call them the “tech humanists”. Amid rising public concern about the power of the industry, they argue that the primary problem with its products is that they threaten our health and our humanity.
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  • It is clear that these products are designed to be maximally addictive, in order to harvest as much of our attention as they can. Tech humanists say this business model is both unhealthy and inhumane – that it damages our psychological well-being and conditions us to behave in ways that diminish our humanity
  • The main solution that they propose is better design. By redesigning technology to be less addictive and less manipulative, they believe we can make it healthier – we can realign technology with our humanity and build products that don’t “hijack” our minds.
  • its most prominent spokesman is executive director Tristan Harris, a former “design ethicist” at Google who has been hailed by the Atlantic magazine as “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience”. Harris has spent years trying to persuade the industry of the dangers of tech addiction.
  • In February, Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of eBay, launched a related initiative: the Tech and Society Solutions Lab, which aims to “maximise the tech industry’s contributions to a healthy society”.
  • the tech humanists are making a bid to become tech’s loyal opposition. They are using their insider credentials to promote a particular diagnosis of where tech went wrong and of how to get it back on track
  • The real reason tech humanism matters is because some of the most powerful people in the industry are starting to speak its idiom. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel has warned about social media’s role in encouraging “mindless scrambles for friends or unworthy distractions”,
  • In short, the effort to humanise computing produced the very situation that the tech humanists now consider dehumanising: a wilderness of screens where digital devices chase every last instant of our attention.
  • After years of ignoring their critics, industry leaders are finally acknowledging that problems exist. Tech humanists deserve credit for drawing attention to one of those problems – the manipulative design decisions made by Silicon Valley.
  • these decisions are only symptoms of a larger issue: the fact that the digital infrastructures that increasingly shape our personal, social and civic lives are owned and controlled by a few billionaires
  • Because it ignores the question of power, the tech-humanist diagnosis is incomplete – and could even help the industry evade meaningful reform
  • Taken up by leaders such as Zuckerberg, tech humanism is likely to result in only superficial changes
  • they will not address the origin of that anger. If anything, they will make Silicon Valley even more powerful.
  • To the litany of problems caused by “technology that extracts attention and erodes society”, the text asserts that “humane design is the solution”. Drawing on the rhetoric of the “design thinking” philosophy that has long suffused Silicon Valley, the website explains that humane design “starts by understanding our most vulnerable human instincts so we can design compassionately”
  • this language is not foreign to Silicon Valley. On the contrary, “humanising” technology has long been its central ambition and the source of its power. It was precisely by developing a “humanised” form of computing that entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs brought computing into millions of users’ everyday lives
  • Facebook had a new priority: maximising “time well spent” on the platform, rather than total time spent. By “time well spent”, Zuckerberg means time spent interacting with “friends” rather than businesses, brands or media sources. He said the News Feed algorithm was already prioritising these “more meaningful” activities.
  • Tech humanists say they want to align humanity and technology. But this project is based on a deep misunderstanding of the relationship between humanity and technology: namely, the fantasy that these two entities could ever exist in separation.
  • They believe we can use better design to make technology serve human nature rather than exploit and corrupt it. But this idea is drawn from the same tradition that created the world that tech humanists believe is distracting and damaging us.
  • The story of our species began when we began to make tools
  • All of which is to say: humanity and technology are not only entangled, they constantly change together.
  • This is not just a metaphor. Recent research suggests that the human hand evolved to manipulate the stone tools that our ancestors used
  • The ways our bodies and brains change in conjunction with the tools we make have long inspired anxieties that “we” are losing some essential qualities
  • Yet as we lose certain capacities, we gain new ones.
  • The nature of human nature is that it changes. It can not, therefore, serve as a stable basis for evaluating the impact of technology
  • Yet the assumption that it doesn’t change serves a useful purpose. Treating human nature as something static, pure and essential elevates the speaker into a position of power. Claiming to tell us who we are, they tell us how we should be.
  • Messaging, for instance, is considered the strongest signal. It’s reasonable to assume that you’re closer to somebody you exchange messages with than somebody whose post you once liked.
  • Harris and his fellow tech humanists also frequently invoke the language of public health. The Center for Humane Technology’s Roger McNamee has gone so far as to call public health “the root of the whole thing”, and Harris has compared using Snapchat to smoking cigarettes
  • The public-health framing casts the tech humanists in a paternalistic role. Resolving a public health crisis requires public health expertise. It also precludes the possibility of democratic debate. You don’t put the question of how to treat a disease up for a vote – you call a doctor.
  • They also remain confined to the personal level, aiming to redesign how the individual user interacts with technology rather than tackling the industry’s structural failures. Tech humanism fails to address the root cause of the tech backlash: the fact that a small handful of corporations own our digital lives and strip-mine them for profit.
  • This is a fundamentally political and collective issue. But by framing the problem in terms of health and humanity, and the solution in terms of design, the tech humanists personalise and depoliticise it.
  • Far from challenging Silicon Valley, tech humanism offers Silicon Valley a useful way to pacify public concerns without surrendering any of its enormous wealth and power.
  • these principles could make Facebook even more profitable and powerful, by opening up new business opportunities. That seems to be exactly what Facebook has planned.
  • reported that total time spent on the platform had dropped by around 5%, or about 50m hours per day. But, Zuckerberg said, this was by design: in particular, it was in response to tweaks to the News Feed that prioritised “meaningful” interactions with “friends” rather than consuming “public content” like video and news. This would ensure that “Facebook isn’t just fun, but also good for people’s well-being”
  • Zuckerberg said he expected those changes would continue to decrease total time spent – but “the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable”. This may describe what users find valuable – but it also refers to what Facebook finds valuable
  • not all data is created equal. One of the most valuable sources of data to Facebook is used to inform a metric called “coefficient”. This measures the strength of a connection between two users – Zuckerberg once called it “an index for each relationship”
  • Facebook records every interaction you have with another user – from liking a friend’s post or viewing their profile, to sending them a message. These activities provide Facebook with a sense of how close you are to another person, and different activities are weighted differently.
  • Holding humanity and technology separate clears the way for a small group of humans to determine the proper alignment between them
  • Why is coefficient so valuable? Because Facebook uses it to create a Facebook they think you will like: it guides algorithmic decisions about what content you see and the order in which you see it. It also helps improve ad targeting, by showing you ads for things liked by friends with whom you often interact
  • emphasising time well spent means creating a Facebook that prioritises data-rich personal interactions that Facebook can use to make a more engaging platform.
  • “time well spent” means Facebook can monetise more efficiently. It can prioritise the intensity of data extraction over its extensiveness. This is a wise business move, disguised as a concession to critics
  • industrialists had to find ways to make the time of the worker more valuable – to extract more money from each moment rather than adding more moments. They did this by making industrial production more efficient: developing new technologies and techniques that squeezed more value out of the worker and stretched that value further than ever before.
  • there is another way of thinking about how to live with technology – one that is both truer to the history of our species and useful for building a more democratic future. This tradition does not address “humanity” in the abstract, but as distinct human beings, whose capacities are shaped by the tools they use.
  • It sees us as hybrids of animal and machine – as “cyborgs”, to quote the biologist and philosopher of science Donna Haraway.
  • The cyborg way of thinking, by contrast, tells us that our species is essentially technological. We change as we change our tools, and our tools change us. But even though our continuous co-evolution with our machines is inevitable, the way it unfolds is not. Rather, it is determined by who owns and runs those machines. It is a question of power
  • The various scandals that have stoked the tech backlash all share a single source. Surveillance, fake news and the miserable working conditions in Amazon’s warehouses are profitable. If they were not, they would not exist. They are symptoms of a profound democratic deficit inflicted by a system that prioritises the wealth of the few over the needs and desires of the many.
  • If being technological is a feature of being human, then the power to shape how we live with technology should be a fundamental human right
  • The decisions that most affect our technological lives are far too important to be left to Mark Zuckerberg, rich investors or a handful of “humane designers”. They should be made by everyone, together.
  • Rather than trying to humanise technology, then, we should be trying to democratise it. We should be demanding that society as a whole gets to decide how we live with technology
  • What does this mean in practice? First, it requires limiting and eroding Silicon Valley’s power.
  • Antitrust laws and tax policy offer useful ways to claw back the fortunes Big Tech has built on common resources
  • democratic governments should be making rules about how those firms are allowed to behave – rules that restrict how they can collect and use our personal data, for instance, like the General Data Protection Regulation
  • This means developing publicly and co-operatively owned alternatives that empower workers, users and citizens to determine how they are run.
  • we might demand that tech firms pay for the privilege of extracting our data, so that we can collectively benefit from a resource we collectively create.
Javier E

The Disturbing New Facts About American Capitalism - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...american-capitalism-1488580706

capitalism concentration marx corporate

shared by Javier E on 05 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • “Let your winners run” is one of the oldest adages in investing. One of the newest ideas is that the winners may be running away with everything.
  • Modern capitalism is built on the idea that as companies get big, they become fat and happy, opening themselves up to lean and hungry competitors that can underprice and overtake them. That cycle of creative destruction may be changing in ways that help explain the seemingly unstoppable rise of the stock market.
  • U.S. companies are moving toward a winner-take-all system in which giants get stronger, not weaker, as they expand.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • That’s the latest among several recent studies by economists working independently, all arriving at similar findings: A few “superstar firms” have grown to dominate their industries, crowding out competitors and controlling markets to a degree not seen in many decades.
  • Let’s look beyond such obvious winner-take-all examples as Apple or Alphabet, the parent of Google.
  • Consider real-estate services. In 1997, according to Profs. Grullon, Larkin and Michaely, that sector had 42 publicly traded companies; the four largest generated 49% of the group’s total revenue. By 2014, only 20 public firms were left, and the top four— CBRE Group, Jones Lang LaSalle, Realogy Holdings and Wyndham Worldwide—commanded 78% of the group’s combined revenue.
  • Or look at supermarkets. In 1997, there were 36 publicly traded companies in that industry, with the top four accounting for more than half of total sales. By 2014, only 11 were left. The top four—Kroger, Supervalu, Whole Foods Market and Roundy’s (since acquired by Kroger)—held 89% of the pie.
  • The U.S. had more than 7,000 public companies 20 years ago, the professors say; nowadays, it’s fewer than 4,000.
  • The winners are also grabbing most of the profits
  • At the end of 1996, the 25 companies in the S&P 500 with the highest net profit margins—income as a percentage of revenue—earned a median of just under 21 cents on every dollar of sales. Last year, the top 25 such companies earned a median of 39 cents on the dollar.
  • Two decades ago, the median net margin among all S&P 500 members was 6.7%. By the end of 2016, that had increased to 9.7%.
  • So while companies as a whole became more profitable over the past 20 years, the winners have become vastly more profitable, nearly doubling the gains they got on each dollar of sales.
  • Why might it be easier now for winners to take all? Prof. Michaely suggests two theories. Declining enforcement of antitrust rules has led to bigger mergers, less competition and higher profits.
  • The other is technology. “If you want to compete with Google or Amazon,” he says, “you’ll have to invest not just billions, but tens of billions of dollars.”
  • Still, history offers a warning. Many times in the past, winners have taken all but seldom for long.
Javier E

The Philosopher Redefining Equality | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...hilosopher-redefining-equality

philosophy equality political theory culture

shared by Javier E on 26 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • The bank experience showed how you could be oppressed by hierarchy, working in an environment where you were neither free nor equal. But this implied that freedom and equality were bound together in some way beyond the basic state of being unenslaved, which was an unorthodox notion. Much social thought is rooted in the idea of a conflict between the two.
  • If individuals exercise freedoms, conservatives like to say, some inequalities will naturally result. Those on the left basically agree—and thus allow constraints on personal freedom in order to reduce inequality. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin called the opposition between equality and freedom an “intrinsic, irremovable element in human life.” It is our fate as a society, he believed, to haggle toward a balance between them.
  • What if they weren’t opposed, Anderson wondered, but, like the sugar-phosphate chains in DNA, interlaced in a structure that we might not yet understand?
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  • At fifty-nine, Anderson is the chair of the University of Michigan’s department of philosophy and a champion of the view that equality and freedom are mutually dependent, enmeshed in changing conditions through time.
  • She has built a case, elaborated across decades, that equality is the basis for a free society
  • Because she brings together ideas from both the left and the right to battle increasing inequality, Anderson may be the philosopher best suited to this awkward moment in American life. She builds a democratic frame for a society in which people come from different places and are predisposed to disagree.
  • she sketched out the entry-level idea that one basic way to expand equality is by expanding the range of valued fields within a society.
  • The ability not to have an identity that one carries from sphere to sphere but, rather, to be able to slip in and adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate while retaining one’s identities in other domains?” She paused. “That is what it is to be free.”
  • How do you move from a basic model of egalitarian variety, in which everybody gets a crack at being a star at something, to figuring out how to respond to a complex one, where people, with different allotments of talent and virtue, get unequal starts, and often meet with different constraints along the way?
  • The problem, she proposed, was that contemporary egalitarian thinkers had grown fixated on distribution: moving resources from lucky-seeming people to unlucky-seeming people, as if trying to spread the luck around.
  • Egalitarians should agree about clear cases of blameless misfortune: the quadriplegic child, the cognitively impaired adult, the teen-ager born into poverty with junkie parents. But Anderson balked there, too. By categorizing people as lucky or unlucky, she argued, these egalitarians set up a moralizing hierarchy.
  • In Anderson’s view, the way forward was to shift from distributive equality to what she called relational, or democratic, equality: meeting as equals, regardless of where you were coming from or going to.
  • By letting the lucky class go on reaping the market’s chancy rewards while asking others to concede inferior status in order to receive a drip-drip-drip of redistributive aid, these egalitarians were actually entrenching people’s status as superior or subordinate.
  • To the ugly and socially awkward: . . . Maybe you won’t be such a loser in love once potential dates see how rich you are.
  • . To the stupid and untalented: Unfortunately, other people don’t value what little you have to offer in the system of production. . . . Because of the misfortune that you were born so poorly endowed with talents, we productive ones will make it up to you: we’ll let you share in the bounty of what we have produced with our vastly superior and highly valued abilities. . . 
  • she imagined some citizens getting a state check and a bureaucratic letter:
  • This was, at heart, an exercise of freedom. The trouble was that many people, picking up on libertarian misconceptions, thought of freedom only in the frame of their own actions.
  • To be truly free, in Anderson’s assessment, members of a society had to be able to function as human beings (requiring food, shelter, medical care), to participate in production (education, fair-value pay, entrepreneurial opportunity), to execute their role as citizens (freedom to speak and to vote), and to move through civil society (parks, restaurants, workplaces, markets, and all the rest).
  • Anderson’s democratic model shifted the remit of egalitarianism from the idea of equalizing wealth to the idea that people should be equally free, regardless of their differences.
  • A society in which everyone had the same material benefits could still be unequal, in this crucial sense; democratic equality, being predicated on equal respect, wasn’t something you could simply tax into existence. “People, not nature, are responsible for turning the natural diversity of human beings into oppressive hierarchies,”
  • Her first book, “Value in Ethics and Economics,” appeared that year, announcing one of her major projects: reconciling value (an amorphous ascription of worth that is a keystone of ethics and economics) with pluralism (the fact that people seem to value things in different ways).
  • Philosophers have often assumed that pluralistic value reflects human fuzziness—we’re loose, we’re confused, and we mix rational thought with sentimental responses.
  • She offered an “expressive” theory: in her view, each person’s values could be various because they were socially expressed, and thus shaped by the range of contexts and relationships at play in a life. Instead of positing value as a basic, abstract quality across society (the way “utility” functioned for economists), she saw value as something determined by the details of an individual’s history.
  • Like her idea of relational equality, this model resisted the temptation to flatten human variety toward a unifying standard. In doing so, it helped expand the realm of free and reasoned economic choice.
  • Anderson’s model unseated the premises of rational-choice theory, in which individuals invariably make utility-maximizing decisions, occasionally in heartless-seeming ways. It ran with, rather than against, moral intuition. Because values were plural, it was perfectly rational to choose to spend evenings with your family, say, and have guilt toward the people you left in the lurch at work.
  • The theory also pointed out the limits on free-market ideologies, such as libertarianism.
  • In ethics, it broke across old factional debates. The core idea “has been picked up on by people across quite a range of positions,” Peter Railton, one of Anderson’s longtime colleagues, says. “Kantians and consequentialists alike”—people who viewed morality in terms of duties and obligations, and those who measured the morality of actions by their effects in the world—“could look at it and see something important.”
  • Traditionally, the discipline is taught through a-priori thought—you start with basic principles and reason forward. Anderson, by contrast, sought to work empirically, using information gathered from the world, identifying problems to be solved not abstractly but through the experienced problems of real people.
  • “Dewey argued that the primary problems for ethics in the modern world concerned the ways society ought to be organized, rather than personal decisions of the individual,”
  • In 2004, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy asked Anderson to compose its entry on the moral philosophy of John Dewey, who helped carry pragmatist methods into the social realm. Dewey had an idea of democracy as a system of good habits that began in civil life. He was an anti-ideologue with an eye for pluralism.
  • She started working with historians, trying to hone her understanding of ideas by studying them in the context of their creation. Take Rousseau’s apparent support of direct democracy. It’s rarely mentioned that, at the moment when he made that argument, his home town of Geneva had been taken over by oligarchs who claimed to represent the public. Pragmatism said that an idea was an instrument, which naturally gave rise to such questions as: an instrument for what, and where, and when?
  • In “What Is the Point of Equality?,” Anderson had already started to drift away from what philosophers, following Rawls, call ideal theory, based on an end vision for a perfectly just society. As Anderson began a serious study of race in America, though, she found herself losing faith in that approach entirely.
  • Broadly, there’s a culturally right and a culturally left ideal theory for race and society. The rightist version calls for color blindness. Instead of making a fuss about skin and ethnicity, its advocates say, society should treat people as people, and let the best and the hardest working rise.
  • The leftist theory envisions identity communities: for once, give black people (or women, or members of other historically oppressed groups) the resources and opportunities they need, including, if they want it, civil infrastructure for themselves.
  • In “The Imperative of Integration,” published in 2010, Anderson tore apart both of these models. Sure, it might be nice to live in a color-blind society, she wrote, but that’s nothing like the one that exists.
  • But the case for self-segregation was also weak. Affinity groups provided welcome comfort, yet that wasn’t the same as power or equality, Anderson pointed out. And there was a goose-and-gander problem. Either you let only certain groups self-segregate (certifying their subordinate status) or you also permitted, say, white men to do it,
  • Anderson’s solution was “integration,” a concept that, especially in progressive circles, had been uncool since the late sixties. Integration, by her lights, meant mixing on the basis of equality.
  • in attending to these empirical findings over doctrine, she announced herself as a non-ideal theorist: a philosopher with no end vision of society. The approach recalls E. L. Doctorow’s description of driving at night: “You can see only as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
  • or others, though, a white woman making recommendations on race policy raised questions of perspective. She was engaging through a mostly white Anglo-American tradition. She worked from the premise that, because she drew on folders full of studies, the limits of her own perspective were not constraining.
  • Some philosophers of color welcomed the book. “She’s taking the need for racial justice seriously, and you could hardly find another white political philosopher over a period of decades doing that,”
  • Recently, Anderson changed the way she assigns undergraduate essays: instead of requiring students to argue a position and fend off objections, doubling down on their original beliefs, she asks them to discuss their position with someone who disagrees, and to explain how and why, if at all, the discussion changed their views.
  • The challenge of pluralism is the challenge of modern society: maintaining equality amid difference in a culture given to constant and unpredictable change.
  • Rather than fighting for the ascendancy of certain positions, Anderson suggests, citizens should fight to bolster healthy institutions and systems—those which insure that all views and experiences will be heard. Today’s righteous projects, after all, will inevitably seem fatuous and blinkered from the vantage of another age.
  • Smith saw the markets as an escape from that order. Their “most important” function, he explained, was to bring “liberty and security” to those “who had before lived almost in a continual state of war with their neighbours, and of servile dependency upon their superiors.”
  • Anderson zeroed in on Adam Smith, whose “The Wealth of Nations,” published in 1776, is taken as a keystone of free-market ideology. At the time, English labor was subject to uncompensated apprenticeships, domestic servitude, and some measure of clerical dominion.
  • Smith, in other words, was an egalitarian. He had written “The Wealth of Nations” in no small part to be a solution to what we’d now call structural inequality—the intractable, compounding privileges of an arbitrary hierarchy.
  • It was a historical irony that, a century later, writers such as Marx pointed to the market as a structure of dominion over workers; in truth, Smith and Marx had shared a socioeconomic project. And yet Marx had not been wrong to trash Smith’s ideas, because, during the time between them, the world around Smith’s model had changed, and it was no longer a useful tool.
  • mages of free market society that made sense prior to the Industrial Revolution continue to circulate today as ideals, blind to the gross mismatch between the background social assumptions reigning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and today’s institutional realities. We are told that our choice is between free markets and state control, when most adults live their working lives under a third thing entirely: private government.
  • Today, people still try to use, variously, both Smith’s and Marx’s tools on a different, postindustrial world:
  • The unnaturalness of this top-heavy arrangement, combined with growing evidence of power abuses, has given many people reason to believe that something is fishy about the structure of American equality. Socialist and anti-capitalist models are again in vogue.
  • Anderson offers a different corrective path. She thinks it’s fine for some people to earn more than others. If you’re a brilliant potter, and people want to pay you more than the next guy for your pottery, great!
  • The problem isn’t that talent and income are distributed in unequal parcels. The problem is that Jeff Bezos earns more than a hundred thousand dollars a minute, while Amazon warehouse employees, many talented and hardworking, have reportedly resorted to urinating in bottles in lieu of a bathroom break. That circumstance reflects some structure of hierarchical oppression. It is a rip in the democratic fabric, and it’s increasingly the norm.
  • Andersonism holds that we don’t have to give up on market society if we can recognize and correct for its limitations—it may even be our best hope, because it’s friendlier to pluralism than most alternatives are.
  • we must be flexible. We must remain alert. We must solve problems collaboratively, in the moment, using society’s ears and eyes and the best tools that we can find.
  • “You can see that, from about 1950 to 1970, the typical American’s wages kept up with productivity growth,” she said. Then, around 1974, she went on, hourly compensation stagnated. American wages have been effectively flat for the past few decades, with the gains of productivity increasingly going to shareholders and to salaries for big bosses.
  • What changed? Anderson rattled off a constellation of factors, from strengthened intellectual-property law to winnowed antitrust law. Financialization, deregulation. Plummeting taxes on capital alongside rising payroll taxes. Privatization, which exchanged modest public-sector salaries for C.E.O. paydays. She gazed into the audience and blinked. “So now we have to ask: What has been used to justify this rather dramatic shift of labor-share of income?”
  • It was no wonder that industrial-age thinking was riddled with contradictions: it reflected what Anderson called “the plutocratic reversal” of classical liberal ideas. Those perversely reversed ideas about freedom were the ones that found a home in U.S. policy, and, well, here we were.
Javier E

Where We Went Wrong | Harvard Magazine - 0 views

www.harvardmagazine.com/...montage-where-we-went-wrong

DeLong prosperity roots 20th century social history economic Galbraith contingent choice public growth crisis culture policy economics

shared by Javier E on 07 May 23 - No Cached
  • John Kenneth Galbraith assessed the trajectory of America’s increasingly “affluent society.” His outlook was not a happy one. The nation’s increasingly evident material prosperity was not making its citizens any more satisfied. Nor, at least in its existing form, was it likely to do so
  • One reason, Galbraith argued, was the glaring imbalance between the opulence in consumption of private goods and the poverty, often squalor, of public services like schools and parks
  • nother was that even the bountifully supplied private goods often satisfied no genuine need, or even desire; a vast advertising apparatus generated artificial demand for them, and satisfying this demand failed to provide meaningful or lasting satisfaction.
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  • economist J. Bradford DeLong ’82, Ph.D. ’87, looking back on the twentieth century two decades after its end, comes to a similar conclusion but on different grounds.
  • DeLong, professor of economics at Berkeley, looks to matters of “contingency” and “choice”: at key junctures the economy suffered “bad luck,” and the actions taken by the responsible policymakers were “incompetent.”
  • these were “the most consequential years of all humanity’s centuries.” The changes they saw, while in the first instance economic, also “shaped and transformed nearly everything sociological, political, and cultural.”
  • DeLong’s look back over the twentieth century energetically encompasses political and social trends as well; nor is his scope limited to the United States. The result is a work of strikingly expansive breadth and scope
  • labeling the book an economic history fails to convey its sweeping frame.
  • The century that is DeLong’s focus is what he calls the “long twentieth century,” running from just after the Civil War to the end of the 2000s when a series of events, including the biggest financial crisis since the 1930s followed by likewise the most severe business downturn, finally rendered the advanced Western economies “unable to resume economic growth at anything near the average pace that had been the rule since 1870.
  • d behind those missteps in policy stood not just failures of economic thinking but a voting public that reacted perversely, even if understandably, to the frustrations poor economic outcomes had brought them.
  • Within this 140-year span, DeLong identifies two eras of “El Dorado” economic growth, each facilitated by expanding globalization, and each driven by rapid advances in technology and changes in business organization for applying technology to economic ends
  • from 1870 to World War I, and again from World War II to 197
  • fellow economist Robert J. Gordon ’62, who in his monumental treatise on The Rise and Fall of American Economic Growth (reviewed in “How America Grew,” May-June 2016, page 68) hailed 1870-1970 as a “special century” in this regard (interrupted midway by the disaster of the 1930s).
  • Gordon highlighted the role of a cluster of once-for-all-time technological advances—the steam engine, railroads, electrification, the internal combustion engine, radio and television, powered flight
  • Pessimistic that future technological advances (most obviously, the computer and electronics revolutions) will generate productivity gains to match those of the special century, Gordon therefore saw little prospect of a return to the rapid growth of those halcyon days.
  • DeLong instead points to a series of noneconomic (and non-technological) events that slowed growth, followed by a perverse turn in economic policy triggered in part by public frustration: In 1973 the OPEC cartel tripled the price of oil, and then quadrupled it yet again six years later.
  • For all too many Americans (and citizens of other countries too), the combination of high inflation and sluggish growth meant that “social democracy was no longer delivering the rapid progress toward utopia that it had delivered in the first post-World War II generation.”
  • Frustration over these and other ills in turn spawned what DeLong calls the “neoliberal turn” in public attitudes and economic policy. The new economic policies introduced under this rubric “did not end the slowdown in productivity growth but reinforced it.
  • the tax and regulatory changes enacted in this new climate channeled most of what economic gains there were to people already at the top of the income scale
  • Meanwhile, progressive “inclusion” of women and African Americans in the economy (and in American society more broadly) meant that middle- and lower-income white men saw even smaller gains—and, perversely, reacted by providing still greater support for policies like tax cuts for those with far higher incomes than their own.
  • Daniel Bell’s argument in his 1976 classic The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Bell famously suggested that the very success of a capitalist economy would eventually undermine a society’s commitment to the values and institutions that made capitalism possible in the first plac
  • In DeLong’s view, the “greatest cause” of the neoliberal turn was “the extraordinary pace of rising prosperity during the Thirty Glorious Years, which raised the bar that a political-economic order had to surpass in order to generate broad acceptance.” At the same time, “the fading memory of the Great Depression led to the fading of the belief, or rather recognition, by the middle class that they, as well as the working class, needed social insurance.”
  • what the economy delivered to “hard-working white men” no longer matched what they saw as their just deserts: in their eyes, “the rich got richer, the unworthy and minority poor got handouts.”
  • As Bell would have put it, the politics of entitlement, bred by years of economic success that so many people had come to take for granted, squeezed out the politics of opportunity and ambition, giving rise to the politics of resentment.
  • The new era therefore became “a time to question the bourgeois virtues of hard, regular work and thrift in pursuit of material abundance.”
  • DeLong’s unspoken agenda would surely include rolling back many of the changes made in the U.S. tax code over the past half-century, as well as reinvigorating antitrust policy to blunt the dominance, and therefore outsize profits, of the mega-firms that now tower over key sectors of the economy
  • He would also surely reverse the recent trend moving away from free trade. Central bankers should certainly behave like Paul Volcker (appointed by President Carter), whose decisive action finally broke the 1970s inflation even at considerable economic cost
  • Not only Galbraith’s main themes but many of his more specific observations as well seem as pertinent, and important, today as they did then.
  • What will future readers of Slouching Towards Utopia conclude?
  • If anything, DeLong’s narratives will become more valuable as those events fade into the past. Alas, his description of fascism as having at its center “a contempt for limits, especially those implied by reason-based arguments; a belief that reality could be altered by the will; and an exaltation of the violent assertion of that will as the ultimate argument” will likely strike a nerve with many Americans not just today but in years to come.
  • what about DeLong’s core explanation of what went wrong in the latter third of his, and our, “long century”? I predict that it too will still look right, and important.
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