#poliecon — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #poliecon, aggregated by home.social.
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(2/2) Enforced asymmetries of action exist all around us but are becoming more common as wealth and power concentrate and market participants closest to market formation influence the mechanisms of exchange. They can shape what it is they're exchanging as well as the conditions under which exchange takes place.
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(1/12) The 'AI bubble' is a political economy story I've spent over 20k words unraveling. LLMs aren't just a technology; they're a mirror of the same delusions that drive market fundamentalism: a naive understanding of innovation, deference to capital, and the denigration of human labor.
Our debates are implicitly about all of these and more. A thread 🧵:
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Chrematistics or accumulation without limit was the most important concept I ever learned about. It's not #greed per se, it's something much worse and it dominates our world. #capitalism #philosophy #misalignedmarkets #poliecon
https://medium.com/@misaligned-markets/greed-is-not-selfishness-0474653eba10
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The latest #misalignedmarkets post is about historical developments that are core to understanding what market capitalism is and how it works. https://misaligned.markets/contingencies-of-capitalism/
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(3/3) Not only do the protocols of capitalism result in rules written and influenced by capital holders, but the rules are so gameable they create easily exploitable vulnerabilities.
The favored position of capital and the breaking of capitalism's rules are fundamental to how capitalist systems evolve. Getting the broader public to recognize that, I think, is the first step towards fighting for a fairer world.
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“Manufacturing employment is down three-months in row for a cumulative loss of 37,000. Since its peak in early ‘23, its down 173,000. Because so much US #manufacturing depends on imported inputs, I’m very concerned that Trump’s escalating #tradewar exacerbates this negative trend.” - @jaredb-econ.bsky.social
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Biggest experiment in US economy in a long time.
From @jc-econ.bsky.social :
The weighted average tariff in effect on US imports continues to creep higher w/ every announcement taking it to levels not seen since the 1930s & customs collections are on track for >$350bn in taxes on US firms & consumers per year while the media dutifully reports things as "not as bad as feared"
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“ #Trump admin is raising #prices that are at the heart of the #affordability crisis". --#JaredBernstein
Post-trade war, tariffs are up $21 billion/month.
Or $736/year for every man, woman. & child living in the US.
At the moment, importers are eating a lot of this tax, but sometime this year, much of this will pass through to consumers. The rest will result in lower margin for businesses without #monopoly power.
https://econjared.substack.com/p/did-someone-neglect-to-tell-the-president?publication
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"When companies face real competitors, then some enshittificatory gambits are unprofitable, because they'll drive your users to competing platforms. That's why Zuckerberg bought Instagram: he had been turning the screws on Facebook users, and when Instagram came along, millions of those users decided that they hated Zuck more than they loved their friends and so they... defected to Instagram."
-- @pluralistichttps://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/#praxis
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Want more affordable housing? A better environment for small business? Tax breaks for the financially stressed? ...& more? #Vote for #HarrisWalz #OpportunityEconomy
cc: @KamalaHarrisWin
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#LaelBrainard gives an update on US economy (1 hour) : https://www.c-span.org/video/?538395-1/white-house-national-economic-adviser-global-economy
For a 30 sec intro: https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5133386/user-clip-economic-update-lael-brainard
Brainard overview starts at 2.40 min - lasts about 10 min. For those interested in US economics, a very worth while 10 min.
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Excellent topic, @pluralistic -- #Economism
"Before the rise of economism, it was common to speak of its subjects as "political economy" or even "moral philosophy" (#AdamSmith , the godfather of capitalism, considered himself a "moral philosopher"). "Political economy" implicitly recognizes that every policy has squishy, subjective, qualitative dimensions that don't readily boil down to math."
https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/18/falsifiability/
Love graphic - high preist
#MiltonFriedman @ Economism's altar #PoliEcon -
“Indeed, the death of #journalism and #publisher isn’t just due to the “internet,” it’s likely a murder by Google.”
Then Facebook starting selling ads… and created a cartel?
“ #google ’s response was to form a cartel with Facebook where Facebook would get better terms in Google auctions than anyone else in return for Facebook no longer seeking to compete in open auctions.”
#AntiMonopoly #Antitrust #PoliEcon -
So true, @pluralistic
"the confusing jargon of finance is not the product of some inherent complexity that requires a whole new vocabulary. Rather, finance-talk is all obfuscation"
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@pluralistic , thanks for highlighting the Biden admin's important initiatives reinvigorating US competition enforcement.
72 items!
In 2021, the Biden admin published an "executive order on competition, laying out a 72-point program for using existing powers vested in the administrative agencies to break up corporate power and get the monopolist's boot off Americans' necks:"
"The Competition EO is basically a checklist...
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Another excellent blog post, @pluralistic .
"Despite being a raving commie loon, Smith's observation was so undeniably true that regulators, policymakers, and economists couldn't help but acknowledge that it was true. The trustbusting era was defined by this idea: if we let the number of companies in a sector get too small, or if we let one or a few companies get too big, they'll eventually start to rig prices."
-- Cory Doctorow
From: https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again
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So about that invisible hand...
"The problem for the West... China’s industrial dominance is underpinned by decades of experience using... all the levers of government & banking, while encouraging frenetic competition among private companies."
“In 2022, Beijing accounted for 85% of all clean-energy manufacturing investment in the world”
How China Pulled So Far Ahead on Industrial Policy - Gift link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/27/business/economy/china-us-tariffs.html?unlocked_article_code=1.vE0.sLyF.pRyVplaJUeg3&smid=url-sharecc: @jgkoomey
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Cory Doctorow has an opinion piece in the Financial Times? The Financial Times is ready to consider the scourge of enshittification? 🤩 Well done, @pluralistic !
This brings me hope for a de-enshittified future. May we all come together to "disrupt" enshittification!
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Competition policy, Biden said, “is how we ensure that our economy isn’t about people working for capitalism; it’s about capitalism working for people.”
https://prospect.org/economy/2023-01-25-pitched-battle-corporate-power/
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❤️ Jan 2023: "A Pitched Battle on Corporate Power: Biden’s expansive executive order seeks to restore competition in the economy. It’s been a long, slow road to get the whole government on board—but there are some formidable gains."
In 2021, Biden signed an order instructing gov to foster "competition in the U.S. economy again."
https://prospect.org/economy/2023-01-25-pitched-battle-corporate-power/
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@nytimes Why does this not surprise me?
"Serious Medical Errors Rose After Private Equity Firms Bought Hospitals"
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If you care about antitrust enforcement - BigTech & other, #MattStoller ’s blog is always important reading -- especially
for the next couple months.https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/quick-read-google-cares-about-googles
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Is Biden killing the free market?
"The media are really going overboard in telling us the days of the free market are over with Biden’s new economic policies. President Biden has quite explicitly implemented policies intended to reshape the direction of the economy, pushing clean energy and more domestic production of advanced semiconductors and other products. He also has reinvigorated anti-trust policy, which was... shelved...."
@DeanBaker13 : https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/07/03/the-myth-of-the-free-market-2/
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A new measure of economic health -- from @aaronsojourner @UpjohnInstitute --
The #LaborLeverageRatio -- measures bargaining power of workers v bosses.
NPR's Planet Money convo w Aaron:
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/05/1174384859/whos-the-boss-in-todays-labor-market
Blog post about...
The Labor Leverage Ratio: A New Measure That Signals a Worker-Driven Recovery :Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/38504981284
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More wisdom from @pluralistic about final stage enshittification. This is where the economy of spying ends up.
"Then we came to the final stage of the enshittification cycle: having hooked both end-users and business customers, Facebook and Google withdrew the surpluses from both groups and handed them to their own shareholders."
** Correction, this is the link I meant to include: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/08/late-stage-sea-monkeys/ **
Want to read later
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar -
"Quart's book braids together four strands: a factual account of the reality of social mobility in America; a kind of psychoanalysis of what the myth of being self-made does to your mind; a power analysis of how the self-made brainworm benefits the rich and powerful, and a program for breaking free of the stultifying grip of a belief in the self-made." from @pluralistic post:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/10/declaration-of-interdependence/
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RT @HalSinger - @halsinger
Not only does Dollar General engage in predation to drive out local grocery stores, per @stacyfmitchell ’s research, they also repeatedly put workers in unsafe positions while paying the lowest wages in retail. Close them down.
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Under Biden, firms have announced $435 billion in investments.
from: https://mastodon.world/@toddntucker/110104251810451654