Oligopoly Everywhere | Hacker News Reader

Oligopoly Everywhere

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84 pointsnabla963 comments

It feels like a tautology. Of course people with power are going to concentrate it and nudge things to ever greater heights in their favor. To attempt to stop it you need other people with power to do something, at which point they will want to do the same.

The only 'solution' is for everyone to be equally poor, because wealth will never be distributed evenly. Those that generate wealth will not stand to lose it, and they have the options to make sure it doesn't happen.

> Of course people with power are going to concentrate it and nudge things to ever greater heights in their favor. To attempt to stop it you need other people with power to do something...

This is true. However you got the following conclusion wrong.

People with power will continue to concentrate it. The solution isn't to prevent people from gaining power (or wealth) - the solution is it have an opposite force always pushing to distribute power again.

So in relative terms people with good ideas, or financial success can gain wealth or power relative to their peers as a reward for success, but the overall system must ensure that on absolute terms that power or success doesn't continuously consolidate and become to heavy.

That is why antitrust, term limits, and yes progressive taxation are some of the most important things a society can do. Checks against power consolidation are the only ways to keep a society functioning with any sort of efficiency.

It's the old school mario cart approach. Yes someone can win the race, but the system also says the further ahead you get, the more headwinds you face and the further behind you are, the more likely you get a tail wind. It's the same reason why sports leagues have hard salary caps and specifically draft picks are distributed in reverse order of success/performance. It's the only way to get actual competition. The same holds in business and society in general. Otherwise you end up with a monopoly or oligopoly stamping out competition.

The only form of free-market competition is enforced free-market competition.

Another solution is to prevent any given period's oligopolies from ossifying. A "new deal" of the cards, so to speak.

(In tech we are relatively lucky that people's careers tend to be longer than the relevant oligopolies)

One near effortless solution is to oss-ify the code & IP of the failing startups (instead of selling it to patent trolls for pennies on dollars anyways). this way oss community moves forward and nextgen startups have something to build off of. at the very least it should help with some rentseeking via basic IP or slowly cutting features and moving them to higher revenue products. this could be done tomorrow with almost no effort if VCs want with early stage startups. Really its a shame to see some good startups fail but their IP locked up behind legal red tape for ever.

Microsoft was the most valuable company in the US in 2000. It still is in the top 5.

Its personal computing operating system has had a 80%+ market share since at least the early 90s.

Ossified oligopolies are often the result of government regulation making competition difficult. There needs to be an easy path for competition to rise alongside large companies. Large corps need to be allowed to fail when they make mistakes as well.

No bailouts. No special treatment.

The tricky part is special treatment isn't always obvious. High minimum wage, insurance requirements and regulatory compliance are all things that are easy for large corps to follow but very costly for cash strapped startups. Often it is the large corps asking for more rules which is a ladder pull of sorts. There are many businesses that just haven't started because they don't pencil out with the high cost of compliance.

Luckily our society is more complex than that, otherwise a single person would literally own everything. Looking at the world and our history, it’s not that there is any single optimal point where the trickle-up effect would somehow balance out; however, there does exist a point beyond which the probability for a revolution increases significantly. I don’t know if it’s the only historical circumstance where oligopolies collapsed, but it’s hard to find other examples.

> Luckily our society is more complex than that, otherwise a single person would literally own everything.

This is the natural end result of the system we are currently stuck with. It just takes time. Every year, we are inching closer to a world where one person owns everything. I don’t expect to see it in my lifetime or the next generation’s lifetime, but maybe within a century or two, if we continue down the track we are on.

The push toward fewer and fewer owning "everything" puts humanity in a position where we're not really very likely to survive another century (or two) and even if we do, we probably won't be very "civilized" anymore. If ever it gets to a point where there's just one person in charge of everything then we'd best hope they're benevolent, fair, intelligent, and wise. The nature of human greed makes that highly unlikely.

The insidious is that even if you somehow created a 100% inheritance / wealth transfer tax (that is, children would inherit virtually nothing from their parents), people with wealth would just rely on creating exclusive networks that the have-nots would not be able to join. Now that I think of it, sort of like the patricians and plebeians of Ancient Rome. You could become fabulously wealthy as a plebeian, but you would never be able to become (and enter the network of) patricians.

> wealth will never be distributed evenly

That is of course the other extreme end. Very few people want fully even distribution of wealth, just a reasonable and fair distribution. What exactly is "reasonable and fair" is a whole different discussion.

The funny thing is that when rhetoric is cooled, people have a really wide and strong agreement about what is "reasonable and fair".

It’s almost as if not everyone agrees on what the basic facts of the “current situation” is.

People who are unsuccessful despite working hard and doing good work recognize the unfairness of the situation… And people who are successful tend to like believing that luck didn’t have that much to do with their success.

I like your 'solution' :).

Wealth as in "having a lot of money" is only as old as money itself. Most of human history has everybody being "poor" in that sense. I'm no primitivist, but there is something nice about the idea of removing the kind of wealth you can calculate with a calculator from the world. Hard to argue i think that it wouldn't be better, even if you don't think the logistics of it will work. It's a utopian thought we should certainly strive for though. What other beautiful future can one even imagine in the long term?

Being able to pile up money is kind of this intrinsicily weird thing. In the development of money it begins as this token to account for surplus. You bring more grain to the silo, you get more tokens. These tokens are exchangeable in the end for grain and that is that. In this way tOtherhe tokens represent a kind of debt. The silo owes you that amount of grain. People begin accepting the token in trade because they can exchange it for grain. It has become money

But unlike our money, these tokens have some naturally occuring soft limits. There is only so much grain anyone will find value in at any given time. Therefore, the amount one could influence another individual with it had some limits. And the amouny of tokens one sloshed into "the market" quickly erroded their vakue.

What this meant was, yes society owed you a debt of commodities but how much that debt waa transactable to different areas was limited and how much you could lean on it at any given time was limited as well.

A well off plantation owner could work very hard, hit a lucky year and dump a ton of grain into the silo. The tokens he got from this would certainly buy him some influence. He could buy a lot of things certain goods would still be unavailable to him. He could pay a lot of bribes but a lot of people would only need so many grain tokens. This farmer contributed a value of surplua grain and the silo tokens can pay him back in many benefits but the further the dealings get from grain, the more limited his power. Ultimately the silo owes him a debt of grain.

Our modern conceot of money obliterates those limits. A clerk at a desk earns the same tokens as a pastor or a soldier or a CEO. Those tokens are then convertible into anything no matter how disparate: food, housing, healthcare, etc. So instead of a commodity debt, owed by a silo, each worker earns a social debt. Effectively carried by all of us. Money is debt.

This means that accomplishing something which leads to a high indebtedness in one area means society owes you a lot in all areas. Again, this seems normal to us but if we think about a distribution of goods that is proportional to the amount and kinds of work people do, it doesn't make much sense. Or at least it seems quite strange and prone to manipulation.

Wealth is not the only variable, though people with wealth try to turn it into one.

Can the richest person on earth in a free society, get a personal armed forces with the state of the art platforms directly under their control today? They will be unable to indulge in this aspect as a splurge, because their money is restricted.

Barely. In the US, you can kit out quite a little army if you're so inclined.

This doesn't get the point though, which is that the concentration is becoming heavier and is in acceleration. This clearly won't sustain forever.

The article speaks about how it might finish in blood bath of the starving crowd decapiting anything presumably on the side of the rich.

It doesn't speacks about a scenario of richest using drone army to make genocide of superfluous plebeans, or using more soft long term means like birth control, great assistance to euthanasia for those who are suffering extrem economical misery as sole alternative and so on.

With great powers comes ability to make great atrocities.

The article also fails to mention biodiversity collapse as it is being crushed by the human species oligopoly.

All Poor Together.

There's a fundamental model as part of the equation here called the yard-sale model.

This is a great explanation: https://pudding.cool/2022/12/yard-sale/

Also discussed 3 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34091098 (325 points, 556 comments)

Check out: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

The rich getting richer and having a lot of power and wealth is hardly anything new. They may manipulate a lot of things and take all the wealth but in a democracy they are still somewhat subject to the will and power of the masses which should balance that out. Much of the discrepancy here in my opinion is a reaction changes in population, education levels, globalaization, technology, major global events,etc... these things tilt that balance one way or the other.

I don't accept tricke down economics but the fact that this is being talked about all the time plus gen-z gaining more power and influence and enduring a lot of major traumatic shared experiences, I'd say a shake up (or down?) is likely in the near future affecting the wealth and power distributions.

They rich subvert the masses by taking control of the media and controlling the narrative. Democracy is a sham because there is so little access to good information on which to base one’s vote.

Except social media is a thing now so people don't rely on mainstream media alone, tech's impact will be clear I think only in a historical context (20y+)

Musk has been open about buying Twitter to more align its politics with his own. It’s just more of the same.

>"Income inequality increased from 1910 to 1930, for example, then declined for forty years before beginning its most recent ascent"

The reason is for that is simple, we lack wars. Ian Morris wrote a somewhat provocative book a few years ago called *War, What is it good for?", talking about the productive nature of war in increasing the capacity of states and populations. To take a very contemporary example, you can almost be certain Ukraine will come out of their current conflict less oligopolistic, more equal and more functional and capable than they were before. A little bit more like Israel, which also does not lack in the conflict department.

That's problematic as a normative theory but evolutionary kind of obvious. If you want dynamism, you need to wipe the slate clean from time to time. That's usually a fairly violent process. Oligopoly is what happens in the abscence of that kind of disruption.

Historians sometimes also argue that the constant wars between France and Britain played a role in the industrial revolution occurring there. Among other things, to finance the war Britain had to borrow money, and to get it they had to sign over more rights to individuals.

I think there's a point the author almost makes here that's pretty important.

> When there’s one rich guy in town and everybody else is starving, it doesn’t seem that crazy to go smash his windows and steal his food. But when there’s 50 rich guys in town, somehow the state of affairs seems fairer.

A major problem we've had in the last century is population explosion. Since the 50's but the world population and US population (and many country's populations) have nearly tripled. All the metrics being discussed here are percentile based. But if we see a higher percentile based level of inequality (e.g. compared to the 20's in the early part of the post) we would have a higher number of disproportionately rich people.

There's simply the possibility that with such a large population size that monopolies are more difficult than ever BUT the problems that monopolies exhibit (they aren't always bad, but they are bad because they leverage they are able to abuse) are also just as bad with oligopolies. It really comes down to a decentralization problem. They say money begets money, but that's true for almost every resource. Even Adam Smith was against these massive conglomerates. We've had a long history of monopoly busting (albeit often too late) but the problem at hand now is that it isn't so obvious anymore. There's no clear monopolies but we see collusion and all the effects as if monopolies existed. Do we really need to squabble when someone says "x is a monopoly" and there are other players in the field? People are just saying "x has a disproportionate amount of control over y industry and are abusing that power." I think we all need to think seriously about this because if we don't allow for a substantial amount of nuance in these conversations and don't work together (even if we disagree in part) then the problems we face will accelerate. A big reason this will accelerate is the Yard-Sale Model

https://pudding.cool/2022/12/yard-sale/

I think that this article could have added the example of the smartphone market with Google and Apple duopoly.

It is not a monopoly as they are two, so I guess it is the main reason why no one has really acted so far, but both of them completely locked the market, resulting in a lot less freedom for users. Marketplace issues are a good example but there are a lot other low profile subjects.

Back in the days of "mobile phones", there used to be a lot more of choice of different makers/system/features.

I don't know that these are very good examples. The box office and newspapers have been declining for years. Companies like Apple of course have a higher revenue relative to US gdp because they can sell their products with ease to rich people all over the world, not just in the US.

It is also completely unsurprising that the internet's most viewed websites is unchanging as the industry has matured, following the pattern of every industry since the industrial revolution.

And the structure of US elections completely discourages third parties, and this is not a new thing. In Europe things are much more dynamic -- France's current president founded his own party and then won the presidency and legislature like a year later. It's also probably good that people are living closer together, ideally as densely as possible, from an environmental perspective.

I think having a solid safety net and healthcare not dependent on employment would free up a lot of people to deviate and risk more. Same thing with cheap housing. I think healthcare, safety net, and housing never get addressed because the oligarchs and private school scions know this on a subconscious level.

Yes. “Setting man free from men” is the way forward. Not pitchforks. Not socialism.

> healthcare, safety net, and housing

This is socialism.

No. Socialism is crab mentality, backed by violence. A socialist does not want people to feel safe and free. Quite the opposite.

What a peculiar thing to say.

I've been thinking a thing similar to the closing paragraph for a while.

I'm so thankful we have a variety of cultures and people and ways of life. I'm excited to learn things from all of them.

This is a big experiment, and nobody figured out the best way to do things, yet.

The two-party problem is directly caused by first past the post election system - I’d like to see data from other countries, my guess is party plurality is as strong as ever there.

It depends on the voting system in those countries. There’s a lot that hasn’t been mirrored in the newer democracies, too, like the Senate and Electoral College.

“For example, before 2000, only about 25% of top-grossing movies were sequels, spinoffs, and remakes. Now it’s usually over 75%.”

It’s a tough pill to swallow but YOU are the problem.

People spending lots of money to make movies, for example, want a high probability of making money.

So, the movies that the audiences pay to see are what get made.

Crappy news sources? Few people want to pay for news either.

An usual top rated movie today costs easily 100 times more than in the 00's. It's no wonder people don't want risks, but the explanation isn't as simple as you are making it.

>It’s a tough pill to swallow but YOU are the problem.

Don't blame the victim. I'm really unhappy that many of these media mergers were allowed to go through by the USG. This was an executive branch failure to enforce existing anti-trust laws. The FCC, FTC, SEC, the DoJ and the President are responsible for this failure. The question remains, in this "American experiment", whether or not "The People" can do anything other than be led by the nose.

I think it goes beyond that. To the judiciary for sure, but further. The notion of what antitrust is for has really shifted over the years. Something like the Bell System breakup, which I think was a great choice, is inconceivable today. And that's due to decades of concerted and well funded effort from parts of the US right to be "business friendly". And the specific businesses they mean here are not the small players and the up and comers, but the relatively small number of very rich people running very large companies.

There’s a percentage of people who will watch a movie with a plot they don’t particularly care for due to lack of better options. You discount that sometimes the market drives viewership by constricting choice. Some decide that a barely acceptable movie is better than no movie. Thus is one of the problems of oligopolies; the incentive isn’t for improvements but for what is barely acceptable.

YOU are not the problem. The individual has ridiculously low power to influence corporate decisions. Individuals may desperately want high quality moving media, but those have lower expected value than "sure bets" of franchises. Art has become dictated by demands of MBAs and shareholders.

Also look at FIFA World Cups right when they were formed versus now, same exact tournament and participants, but the modern has become completely filled with "value" through ads.

Exactly this. If you listen to the stories told by directors and writers of cult classic movies/shows then you'll hear them often talk about having to fight for it and how much of a "risk" the movie was. Hell, Guillermo del Toro has yet to produce At The Mountains of Madness despite it already having many eager fans waiting. But we also have problems with advertising and distribution. Every Sci-Fi lover I know loves Arrival but that movie didn't even play in half the theaters when it came out.

Ironically we're seeing many streaming services produce higher quality content and a big part is that they are taking more risks. People are not just being vocal, but voting with their dollars. I'd far rather see something in the theaters than at home but not only is the price of a movie far higher than a month of streaming, but there just are so few good theatrical movies now. A major part of streaming services' success actively demonstrates that YOU are not the problem.

> The individual has ridiculously low power to influence corporate decisions.

What power does corporate have to force someone to watch a game of football?

> the modern has become completely filled with "value" through ads.

Because sufficient people agree with trade. If they were not OK with the trade, sufficient people would do any of the countless other activities available to them.

People are the problem in cases of entertainment. You don't need to watch only sequels or remakes, or deal with the latest broken mess made by some AAA filled with lootboxes. The options are out there still.

It's a different story for industries where doing the alternative has a high amount of friction. Entertainment is not one of them.

High quality media hasn't stopped being produced, but the sure bets are performing better.

Sure, the risky subversive stuff doesn't have multi-million dollar marketing budgets, but why should it, it's risky and subversive.

The current media environment is the product of what people give attention to.

It's a construct that the purpose of art is to turn a profit and not enrich. But that construct is so deeply instilled that you'd be very hard pressed to find someone who thinks producers of works have responsibility to anyone other than shareholders.

Yes, literally every statement about what art is, what it should be, how it should be made and for who is a construct.

That's entirely beside the point and not an argument for why certain kinds of art thrive.

> It’s a tough pill to swallow but YOU are the problem.

This seems like an argument that is always true, and thus close to meaningless. What movies are popular? My fault. Rising economic inequality? My fault, I should negotiate harder and not accept poor treatment. Climate destruction? My fault, I didn't choose the most environmentally friendly options every time. Rising obesity? My fault.

It's not wrong, but it's not very satisfying, and we should be looking for more insight and more reliable solutions. "My plan is for 8 billion people to change their habits" isn't as reliable as "let's regulate 100 companies".

> "My plan is for 8 billion people to change their habits" isn't as reliable as "let's regulate 100 companies".

100? You could probably apply crushing regulation and taxes to 10 companies on the planet, and the outcome would be a measurably better world! That’s how bad it’s become.

Viewers are far from the only problem here. Indeed, part of is us, the nerds.

One giant thing that has changed since 2000 is how people consume media. The number of movie tickets sold peaked in 2002. [1] It's a declining market. DVD sales are even worse, down by 90% or more. [2] And perhaps worse yet, shifting video to the internet changed expectations from theater- and DVD-style pricing to free and/or all-you-can-eat pricing. All that plus YouTube and expanding video games created massive competition for entertainment dollars, further diminishing the competitive advantage of long-form film.

Given that it's not shocking that movie funders have generally become risk averse. Or theatergoers, really. The comparative effort between picking something cromulent off Netflix and hauling over to the mall means people are going to be less likely to take a gamble on a film than they were 40 years ago. And that's not going to change much.

So instead, I think we people in tech need to figure out better ways to fund and distribute good movies. That, or accept that the good stuff will be happening mostly in places other than the silver screen.

[1] https://www.the-numbers.com/market/

[2] https://www.wired.com/story/why-do-dvds-exist/

I've read that the decline of DVD sales are the precise reason for much of the monoculture in feature releases since you could re-coup much of the budget of e.g. rom-coms, which were plentiful in the 90s and 00s.

The Last of Us Part I & II are better than most feature releases in the 2010s. I'm sure there are other games on that level as well.

It seems like it should trend more and more that way as time goes on. I like new things, variety is the spice of life after all. However, a natural part of that journey is disappointment and lots of middling enjoyable experiences, be it food, movies, or anything else.

That said, once I have found a good thing (Star Wars) I want more of that good thing in addition to new experiences. I am enjoying the new take on Game of Thrones, the new take on Lord of the Rings, and really looking forward to the upcoming new take on Harry Potter (hog warts legacy). As more time passes the tried and true franchises should continue to produce while new things are tried on the side in an attempt to build new franchises.

I'm willing to believe I'm the problem with news (I don't pay for any directly, though I don't generally run adblockers), but the movies... I watch more non-sequels/spinoffs/remakes than I do franchise films.

Perhaps it's better to say the demand-side in general is a big part of the problem? But on the other hand, sometimes it's hard to know you want something that isn't being made and marketed.

Yes, the commons are the problem in the tragedy of the commons.

Agreed - I have been doing the bare minimum by avoiding Marvel and Star Wars, but people simply seem to love franchises.

No matter what you say though, the crowd never apologizes. Only a few will try to make concessions but it will not be enough.

There's also the fact that people will optimize for certain ends, and the most common end is to be 'sucessful' or at least look like it.

I think it’s just the law of Nature and social interactions. People/companies/entities get into the positive or negative self-reinforcing cycles. Exact same thing happens under the Socialism/Communism. Dr. Jordan Peterson talks a lot about it. The real danger is when companies become monopolies. I think at this point, it’s the role of the government to break them up. Lately, the governments have been refusing to constrain the monopoly powers and that’s a big problem.

the lobster guy?

Why of course, lobsters have hierarchy and so a loaf of bread must be $27.

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