Hacker News Reader

Comment by roussanoff | Hacker News Reader

As an economist, I strongly believe this is a strawman argument. Economists have studied cooperation for decades. Methodological individualism that the article mentions is not an assumption that everyone is waging war against each other, and the war against each other does not follow from methodological individualism. Game theory was interested in cooperation, especially across many time periods, for as long as it existed. Avner Greif has done amazing work on the rise of cooperative institutions. These things are a part of standard curriculum for any economics major (although maybe not a 101 class). This is not to say that economics is free of issues, but the claims of the article reveal that the author has no idea about what economists care about and have cared about for decades now.

View on HN

Two thirds of the way through this all I could think of was “strawman”. He talks about the invisible hand but doesn’t even namecheck Smith or his central thesis.

If he understood that, he might understand that Jeff Bezos got rich not by exploiting people but rather by improving people’s lives

Why not both?

More effective exploitation of labor is a competitive advantage that lowers costs and thereby increases profits and/or allows for lower prices. Exploitation of workers and value delivered to consumers are entirely compatible.

Also, Amazon uses (used? it might have stopped) its influence to prevent sellers from selling things cheaper off Amazon, meaning the Amazon tax gets applied to the product everywhere – reducing consumer incentives to buy things without Amazon. This is neither exploitation of labour nor delivering value to consumers.

If Amazon were uniquely exploitative, why would anyone work there? In the US, the number of available jobs has regularly outstripped the number of unemployed, which is to say that there is no shortage of jobs--and yet folks are choosing to work at Amazon rather than any other alternative. The most straightforward explanation for this would seem to be that working at Amazon is the best option available to people who work at Amazon, which doesn't seem to be compatible with the idea that Amazon is somehow uniquely exploitative. .

That's not an argument that the option is good or even acceptable. People who jumped from the twin towers chose their best option, too.

So Amazon is exploitative, even if they're the best option available to workers... because all employers are exploitative? This isn't an argument against Amazon at all--you're just bellyaching about "the system".

Bellyaching is an oddly dismissive term.

"The system" is what had workers move a dead co-worker and then "put in another co-worker to keep the line going” at a Frito-Lay plant.[0]

Yeah, I'm bellyaching.

[0] https://www.cjonline.com/story/opinion/2021/07/02/frito-lay-...

This is not a reputable source, and doesn’t link any source to support its claims—it’s just a list of unsupported accusations.

Sounds like you have never worked at Amazon.

No, I haven’t. But I have bought a lot of things from them and used AWS extensively.

Their employees are there, I assume, because working for Amazon is better than their next best alternative.

Homelessness? Yes, sort of. I have family who work at a distribution center. They work under conditions that I couldn't contend with at a similar facility and which quickly drove me out. I don't know how they manage psychologically with late nights and stringent scheduling; they only manage economically with help from other family.

Amazon is, without a doubt, exploitative. And it's quite annoying to have someone, whose only contact with them is as a consumer and quasi-client, to be so adamant that they aren't.

That is not to say you can't get rich without improving lives, or that that you can't get rich explicitly by harming people's quality of life.

There are countless cognitive exploits such as short term thinking that people can take advantage of, in addition to outright fraud and abuse.

These are valid questions to ask, but my personal view is most of those making the claims aren't showing their work, just positing they are true.

When the claim is that a millions amazon workers and contractors plus hundreds of millions of customers are acting against their best interests, you need strong evidence.

> If he understood that, he might understand that Jeff Bezos got rich not by exploiting people but rather by improving people’s lives

The catch here is that it was a marginal improvement for some people, not everyone. Before e-commerce took off, there was a lovely amount of serendipity going out to pick up an album or even a new graphics card. I'd run across buskers, parades, protests, weird little shops I had no idea existed, and had great conversations with perfect strangers. Now the whole experience is so efficient that it has disappeared entirely. Something of value is being lost when tens of thousands of small business are shuttered and replaced by a single corporate entity with enormous power and leverage over their competitors.

A web page is never going to compare with the amount of information and variety I can experience in person. Their "recommendations" are simply not as good as the advice of a small business owner who used to help me pick out what I was looking for. I spend so much time researching before I buy, because I can't judge the quality of a product by looking at an image of it. Instead of the old model of trusting a local expert, I have to now become the expert for every single category of thing I buy.

(Also, Amazon's employees are definitely exploited, and that's absolutely one reason why he is wealthy. The first thing they did when they bought Whole Foods was cut pay and benefits.)

Small businesses and serendipity were largely crushed before Amazon became dominant.

Albums were bought at Best Buy, graphics cards were bought at Fry's, books were bought at Borders, tools were bought at Home Depot, groceries were bought at Kroger... (or sometimes they were almost all bought at Walmart or Target instead of any of those!)

Bezos was rich before the next-day-everything-fulfill-as-fast-as-possible push of the last decade. What did the warehouse environment look like back then? It won by doing better, but unforunately that alone isn't good enough, you have to FOREVER get more and more efficient, so the market demands exploitation at some point.

it's very much a trade off. I too remember going to independent record stores when I was younger. every once in a while, I got into a cool conversation with someone who worked there and discovered a new band. much more often, I left empty handed because they didn't have the specific album I wanted. I didn't have particularly obscure taste; it's just not practical for a small shop to stock every single album that exists.

if you want someone to pick a reasonably good example of X for you or if you actually enjoy the experience of shopping, then yeah, amazon sucks. if you want a specific thing, amazon is pretty much the best store ever; if it's out of stock on amazon, it's probably out of stock everywhere else too.

How much do you think his salary and stock grants would do for the employees if it was distributed? Less than a dollar a year. He could sell all his equity and give a one time bonus of 10k and then they would be in the same boat. He could give all of his stock to the company, and they could get $1,000 a year in profit sharing. Less than half of the profit is in retail, but maybe that's closer to $500 a year

It goes beyond that. Did everyone forget mail-order catalogs? Even up into my early teens, we would regularly receive them. One could mail-in (or phone-in) orders for a similar variety of goods as is available on Amazon (relative to the number of goods generally available in the American market). I understand that they're still common for enterprise, if for little else as marketing. Amazon's advantage over those is not so large, and the caveats involved in using it make me wonder about the net utility - especially now, as the politicians whose Amazon's success has enabled have badly damaged our postal system and drastically slowed the delivery of goods not available at a local distribution center.

Or, all the people who did the work to make it possible to sell things over the internet made peoples lives better, and then a Hedge Fund manager figured out how he could take a 200 Billion dollar cut as a middleman.

> ...the author has no idea about what economists care about and have cared about for decades now.

While scientific progress may advance one funeral at a time, some "zombie" ideas are rather more tenacious.

To your point, a nod to more contemporary behavioral economic schools of thought would be useful. As would pointing out how rhetorical economics has not kept apace.

I agree, though this article seems to more use it as a foil than anything else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com