FTC documents show that antitrust economics establishment and Obama-era corruption led to a monopoly takeover of our economy. Joe Biden can undo the damage.
I'm an economist. The problem isn't economics. The problem is the fraud known as neoclassical economics. Classical economists like Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill focused on distribution. Monopolists were the enemy, notably landowners who "got richer in their sleep." In the late 19th century, the inventors of neoclassical economics, notably John Bates Clark, shifted the focus from distribution and monopoly to ask how can an economy be more efficient?
First, Clark was responding to Henry George's critique of land monopoly, which was part of a long line of political philosophers that included Mill. So I'm in agreement with you in saying that economics post-Henry George should be disregarded, except for a few rebels like Keynes. Second, the specific political problem is importing values into the law by framing the law as driven by econometric models. Economists are free to do whatever they want, but courts should interpret antitrust laws without reference to their work.
I agree on antitrust laws. Not many people know that Clark was responding to George. Mostly Clark has been criticized for trying to show that workers are paid exactly what they contribute--so there's no justification for unions or laws protecting labor.
I have a hard time believing Biden will do much different than Obama. Most of his policies right out the gate are Obama-era reversals of Trump-era moves, and they seem to be bigger on halting gun ownership and raising corporate taxes than breaking up monopolies.
In Gmail, Substack articles from Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss all go into my main Inbox tab. Substack articles from Matt Stoller and Glen Greenwald all go into my Promotions tab.
To make sure I see them all, had to create a label that automatically tags everything from Substack. Have to watch the label for when new messages arrive.
I just turned off the tabbed inbox entirely, and I practice a variety of "inbox zero" discipline, either deleting stuff or moving it to a label. This requires diligently unsubscribing from stuff if it's just clutter that I don't actually read, and turning off email notifs from social apps, to keep the overall flow low enough to be manageable.
I try to at least every 2-3 days also go through and check my Spam folder, to fish out activist stuff that got sent there (even if I'm then going to unsubscribe from it, I want to make sure to tell the filter "this wasn't spam", because that may help prevent it from going to spam for people who WANT to read it).
I've built a set of filters that direct most things to the tabs; it took a while. Medium, Substack, and newsletters go to the Social tab. Other emails of interest go to the Forums tab. I browse the Primary tab daily for personal emails, and the Promotions tab and the Spam folder at least weekly to make sure I didn't miss anything. (I discovered, while looking for a password reset link, that Gmail will send essential mail to the Spam folder.)
You can righ click on any email and send to a different tab. Then at the bottom it will ask "do you always want to do this from this address". With some diligence you can mostly train/help gmail to select the correct tabs without resorting to more complicated gmail tags and filters.
The part about bad search results for rehab programs reminded me of another issue. Try googling "Obamacare plans." You'll see the top sponsored results are all non-governmental, non-EDE websites that take people looking for ACA/Obamacare plans and pushes them into short-term health insurance or health-sharing ministries, exploitative products that don't legally qualify as health insurance and don't comply with the ACA. These ads explode during Open Enrollment Period. Google has been asked by many in the government to only allow government health insurance exchanges and EDE partners (basically companies that partner with the federal government and are allowed to show all ACA/Obamacare plans to consumers) to advertise on search terms like "Obamacare" and "Affordable Care Act insurance," but Google has refused.
Thanks, Matt, great post. I work in the area of agricultural transportation, and monopolization there, as you've written about in Goliath, is as old as time. From the Interstate Commerce Commission reduced to the Surface Transportation Board; to carriers, including railroads and ocean, dictating the terms for shippers and producers, while enforcers shirk their regulatory authority; to immense vertical integration of ag processing/transport so that Archer Daniels Midland can essentially "own the pipes"; to the most recent merger between Canadian Pacific with Kansas City Southern to form "the first Mexico-US-Canada freight rail network" (CNN)... throughout, and obscuring itself, private government governs food production. Watching the antitrust subcommittee revive democracy in the tech sector ("today's most elegant example of monopolization" as Lina Khan calls it), I know that the subcommittee wrote its recommendations to be broad and far-reaching, so hope that Congress sets its scopes on agriculture soon. Cheers,
The discussion of scammers is the weakest part of here. What is said about Google can be said about the phone book. I’m not sure we need Google playing ad hoc FTC and state AG.
Matt, have you considered the value and benefit of TAXING AD PLACEMENTS and TAXING THE RUNNING OF ADS as a strategy to reduce the glut of useless, destructive ads ruining the psychic commons? I understand this is a congress-level issue. However if we don't talk about taxing ads, we never get there.
The furthest I got in my visioning on this is CRITERIA: Which ads would you tax? Which ones would you not want to tax? Which ads would you wish to tax into oblivion?
My best fantasy on this so far is to have an un-elected, appointed board of criteria setters who have the power to tax ads and how much. Just empaneling such a criteria board would draw fire away from the taxes themself, a good thing.
Plenty of challenges with such an idea: diversity? Cancel culture?
Attacking ad culture directly thru taxation would create a huge media frenzy. Use this as in akido to get people talking about what a healthy psychic commons could be.
If you make who's on the board and who's not the center of media attention, the more basic activity of taxing ads detrimental to the psychic commons can proceed with less push-back. Let all the media attention be on personalities. Any taxing of ads, at any rate, starts creating a new norm of considering the public good. Similar to the Robin Hood tax on all stock trades.
Yes, I've considered it. I'm not quite there. The problem as I see it isn't ads, it's consolidation of the ad market. By the time we get to the taxing stage the problem is already baked.
Seems like the FTC memo is as much about Microsoft as Google. Also relevant that Julie Brill the then Commissioner of the FTC is now Microsoft's Privacy Lawyer. In 2011 as the head of FTC she hosted China at Microsoft's campus to teach them how to data mine. This isn't just about search results or antitrust. This is a National Security issue.
I dunno. Silicon Valley is definitely full of monopolies. But it seems slightly disingenuous to leave out all relative context. The financial world was imploding and hanging by a thread 2008-2012. It is a very big and probably unrealistic ask for Obma to take on the tech titans since it seemed to be the only part of the economy to be working back then. Even if he was inclined which he probably wasn't. Shortsighted but somewhat understandable. I know the economy is just as bad/worse now, but it seems the golden boy view is reversing for tech finally. Which is a good thing.
IDK Matt I think you're being a bit too optimistic. Biden is as corrupt as they come.
Lina Khan and Tim Wu, while promising picks, were appointed to positions with not a great amount of power. Typical corporate democrat move; throw scraps to the base while ultimately maintaining the status quo.
I think Yglesias' take there was always somewhat tongue-in-cheek. If you read the rest of the post you linked, he adds, "It’s also the most terrifying competitor in the world. My main point is simply that the key here is Bezos’ relatioship with shareholders. Lots of companies would, I’m sure, love to delight their customers by slashing prices to a zero-margin level. The problem is most companies would worry that plummeting profit margins would lead to fired executives and mass layoffs of rank-and-file employees. But Bezos has the confidence of the investment community and earns a staggering P/E ratio for his company."
Though in some ways perhaps this is _more_ damning -- the possibility of Amazon devouring the market and becoming a monopolist was always visible, and the fact that this was a primrose path to perdition should've been made more explicit in commentary, not downplayed in favor of looking at the temporary upside.
I think you probably can make a similar critique of '90s to early '00s Paul Krugman, but he has very strongly come around to the view that a huge portion of modern corporate profits are driven by market power.
Oof. Yeah that was not a good contrarian take at the time, and even worse in retrospect. :-/
I know Matt a bit, and agree with him on a lot of topics. We've traded emails now and then for years, and we've met face to face a few times. I think he's somebody that is open to learning and revising his views. I think if you approached him about this in a not-overly-hostile manner and asked him to do, like, a Clubhouse conversation, or a text-chat interview/debate in which he'd have the option to reflect on what he got wrong, and where he still disagrees with you, he would probably be open to it. Speaking for myself, I would find that an interesting conversation to observe.
I'm an economist. The problem isn't economics. The problem is the fraud known as neoclassical economics. Classical economists like Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill focused on distribution. Monopolists were the enemy, notably landowners who "got richer in their sleep." In the late 19th century, the inventors of neoclassical economics, notably John Bates Clark, shifted the focus from distribution and monopoly to ask how can an economy be more efficient?
First, Clark was responding to Henry George's critique of land monopoly, which was part of a long line of political philosophers that included Mill. So I'm in agreement with you in saying that economics post-Henry George should be disregarded, except for a few rebels like Keynes. Second, the specific political problem is importing values into the law by framing the law as driven by econometric models. Economists are free to do whatever they want, but courts should interpret antitrust laws without reference to their work.
I agree on antitrust laws. Not many people know that Clark was responding to George. Mostly Clark has been criticized for trying to show that workers are paid exactly what they contribute--so there's no justification for unions or laws protecting labor.
I have a hard time believing Biden will do much different than Obama. Most of his policies right out the gate are Obama-era reversals of Trump-era moves, and they seem to be bigger on halting gun ownership and raising corporate taxes than breaking up monopolies.
In Gmail, Substack articles from Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss all go into my main Inbox tab. Substack articles from Matt Stoller and Glen Greenwald all go into my Promotions tab.
To make sure I see them all, had to create a label that automatically tags everything from Substack. Have to watch the label for when new messages arrive.
I just turned off the tabbed inbox entirely, and I practice a variety of "inbox zero" discipline, either deleting stuff or moving it to a label. This requires diligently unsubscribing from stuff if it's just clutter that I don't actually read, and turning off email notifs from social apps, to keep the overall flow low enough to be manageable.
I try to at least every 2-3 days also go through and check my Spam folder, to fish out activist stuff that got sent there (even if I'm then going to unsubscribe from it, I want to make sure to tell the filter "this wasn't spam", because that may help prevent it from going to spam for people who WANT to read it).
I've built a set of filters that direct most things to the tabs; it took a while. Medium, Substack, and newsletters go to the Social tab. Other emails of interest go to the Forums tab. I browse the Primary tab daily for personal emails, and the Promotions tab and the Spam folder at least weekly to make sure I didn't miss anything. (I discovered, while looking for a password reset link, that Gmail will send essential mail to the Spam folder.)
You can righ click on any email and send to a different tab. Then at the bottom it will ask "do you always want to do this from this address". With some diligence you can mostly train/help gmail to select the correct tabs without resorting to more complicated gmail tags and filters.
The part about bad search results for rehab programs reminded me of another issue. Try googling "Obamacare plans." You'll see the top sponsored results are all non-governmental, non-EDE websites that take people looking for ACA/Obamacare plans and pushes them into short-term health insurance or health-sharing ministries, exploitative products that don't legally qualify as health insurance and don't comply with the ACA. These ads explode during Open Enrollment Period. Google has been asked by many in the government to only allow government health insurance exchanges and EDE partners (basically companies that partner with the federal government and are allowed to show all ACA/Obamacare plans to consumers) to advertise on search terms like "Obamacare" and "Affordable Care Act insurance," but Google has refused.
Thanks, Matt, great post. I work in the area of agricultural transportation, and monopolization there, as you've written about in Goliath, is as old as time. From the Interstate Commerce Commission reduced to the Surface Transportation Board; to carriers, including railroads and ocean, dictating the terms for shippers and producers, while enforcers shirk their regulatory authority; to immense vertical integration of ag processing/transport so that Archer Daniels Midland can essentially "own the pipes"; to the most recent merger between Canadian Pacific with Kansas City Southern to form "the first Mexico-US-Canada freight rail network" (CNN)... throughout, and obscuring itself, private government governs food production. Watching the antitrust subcommittee revive democracy in the tech sector ("today's most elegant example of monopolization" as Lina Khan calls it), I know that the subcommittee wrote its recommendations to be broad and far-reaching, so hope that Congress sets its scopes on agriculture soon. Cheers,
Any thoughts on what the Canadian Pacific with Kansas City Southern merger will do?
The discussion of scammers is the weakest part of here. What is said about Google can be said about the phone book. I’m not sure we need Google playing ad hoc FTC and state AG.
More evidence that economists in general are clueless and have too much, way too much power!
Matt, have you considered the value and benefit of TAXING AD PLACEMENTS and TAXING THE RUNNING OF ADS as a strategy to reduce the glut of useless, destructive ads ruining the psychic commons? I understand this is a congress-level issue. However if we don't talk about taxing ads, we never get there.
The furthest I got in my visioning on this is CRITERIA: Which ads would you tax? Which ones would you not want to tax? Which ads would you wish to tax into oblivion?
My best fantasy on this so far is to have an un-elected, appointed board of criteria setters who have the power to tax ads and how much. Just empaneling such a criteria board would draw fire away from the taxes themself, a good thing.
Plenty of challenges with such an idea: diversity? Cancel culture?
Attacking ad culture directly thru taxation would create a huge media frenzy. Use this as in akido to get people talking about what a healthy psychic commons could be.
If you make who's on the board and who's not the center of media attention, the more basic activity of taxing ads detrimental to the psychic commons can proceed with less push-back. Let all the media attention be on personalities. Any taxing of ads, at any rate, starts creating a new norm of considering the public good. Similar to the Robin Hood tax on all stock trades.
Yes, I've considered it. I'm not quite there. The problem as I see it isn't ads, it's consolidation of the ad market. By the time we get to the taxing stage the problem is already baked.
Thank you, right, break corrupt monopoly practices, THEN ads could be taxed.
Seems like the FTC memo is as much about Microsoft as Google. Also relevant that Julie Brill the then Commissioner of the FTC is now Microsoft's Privacy Lawyer. In 2011 as the head of FTC she hosted China at Microsoft's campus to teach them how to data mine. This isn't just about search results or antitrust. This is a National Security issue.
https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/public_statements/privacy-implications-social-media/111207chinaforum.pdf
I dunno. Silicon Valley is definitely full of monopolies. But it seems slightly disingenuous to leave out all relative context. The financial world was imploding and hanging by a thread 2008-2012. It is a very big and probably unrealistic ask for Obma to take on the tech titans since it seemed to be the only part of the economy to be working back then. Even if he was inclined which he probably wasn't. Shortsighted but somewhat understandable. I know the economy is just as bad/worse now, but it seems the golden boy view is reversing for tech finally. Which is a good thing.
IDK Matt I think you're being a bit too optimistic. Biden is as corrupt as they come.
Lina Khan and Tim Wu, while promising picks, were appointed to positions with not a great amount of power. Typical corporate democrat move; throw scraps to the base while ultimately maintaining the status quo.
I think Yglesias' take there was always somewhat tongue-in-cheek. If you read the rest of the post you linked, he adds, "It’s also the most terrifying competitor in the world. My main point is simply that the key here is Bezos’ relatioship with shareholders. Lots of companies would, I’m sure, love to delight their customers by slashing prices to a zero-margin level. The problem is most companies would worry that plummeting profit margins would lead to fired executives and mass layoffs of rank-and-file employees. But Bezos has the confidence of the investment community and earns a staggering P/E ratio for his company."
Though in some ways perhaps this is _more_ damning -- the possibility of Amazon devouring the market and becoming a monopolist was always visible, and the fact that this was a primrose path to perdition should've been made more explicit in commentary, not downplayed in favor of looking at the temporary upside.
He's joking, but he also believes it. Yglesias thinks very highly of Amazon's business model as a useful social enterprise. For example: https://www.vox.com/2014/10/22/7016827/amazon-hachette-monopoly
I think you probably can make a similar critique of '90s to early '00s Paul Krugman, but he has very strongly come around to the view that a huge portion of modern corporate profits are driven by market power.
Oof. Yeah that was not a good contrarian take at the time, and even worse in retrospect. :-/
I know Matt a bit, and agree with him on a lot of topics. We've traded emails now and then for years, and we've met face to face a few times. I think he's somebody that is open to learning and revising his views. I think if you approached him about this in a not-overly-hostile manner and asked him to do, like, a Clubhouse conversation, or a text-chat interview/debate in which he'd have the option to reflect on what he got wrong, and where he still disagrees with you, he would probably be open to it. Speaking for myself, I would find that an interesting conversation to observe.
He's pretty hardcore baked into a pro-Amazon posture.