Any comments on how China is exploiting robots for care of increasingly aged population? Similarly, how is China using AI in education-especially K12, and in poorer locales where there is likely a shortage of qualified teachers?
Re: mentioning Ro Khanna, he’s obviously been getting into it quite a bit with tech twitter the past few days over the billionaire tax proposal. Curious if you have any thoughts there?
On the pharmacy point, it's worth noting that one of the big Congressional fighters against the Pharmacy Benefit Managers is Jake Auchincloss. You can find his (very good!) interview with neo-Brandeisian / anti-monopoly champions Stoller and Dayen here: https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/episode-4-the-revolt-of-the-pharmacists
Funny thing, though... Auchincloss is _also_ extremely popular with Abundant Dems:
I believe Derek Thompson is responsible for the part of the Abundance book that talks about the need for our political leaders to be "bottleneck detectives", who look for what factors are _limiting_ production, preventing abundance. Monopoly businesses absolutely can be the source of that kind of bottleneck, and where they are, we should regulate or break them up! Abundants are totally in agreement with the anti-monopoly folks on that!
The tension between abundance vs. small business seems pretty clear to me. Infrastructure doesn't *differentially* help small business, and while deregulation can help, the absolute most it can do is allow small business and big business to compete on a level playing field—in which case big business will win easily. The only way small business can win in most sectors is if regulators specifically put a thumb on the scale in its favor, and the abundance people are generally against that.
Yeah this is the point that the most-committed anti-monopoly folks seem to have an _aesthetic_ preference for small businesses, even if they're truly less efficient. Abundants just want a level playing field, where big players can't wield bigness itself to drive smaller players from the field.
The anti-monopolists point to a variety of real cases where big players are doing that kind of thing, like Amazon's "if you want to list on Amazon, you can't list a lower price at another store", which forced vendors to price in Prime's free shipping, and not advertise the true price absent the shipping costs anywhere elsewhere. A lot of Abundants agree that pro-competition policymakers should intervene to stop that kind of thing, and anti-trust law should be used to break up niche roll-up monopolies (like Varsity Brands in cheer sport). We just wouldn't necessarily go so far as saying that Amazon itself needs to be cracked up into separate divisons. If they operate efficiently as an "everything store", without abusing vendors and customers, that's fine.
Any comments on how China is exploiting robots for care of increasingly aged population? Similarly, how is China using AI in education-especially K12, and in poorer locales where there is likely a shortage of qualified teachers?
Re: mentioning Ro Khanna, he’s obviously been getting into it quite a bit with tech twitter the past few days over the billionaire tax proposal. Curious if you have any thoughts there?
On the pharmacy point, it's worth noting that one of the big Congressional fighters against the Pharmacy Benefit Managers is Jake Auchincloss. You can find his (very good!) interview with neo-Brandeisian / anti-monopoly champions Stoller and Dayen here: https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/episode-4-the-revolt-of-the-pharmacists
Funny thing, though... Auchincloss is _also_ extremely popular with Abundant Dems:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9h98CrKrCM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KU0U7zsoC-w
I believe Derek Thompson is responsible for the part of the Abundance book that talks about the need for our political leaders to be "bottleneck detectives", who look for what factors are _limiting_ production, preventing abundance. Monopoly businesses absolutely can be the source of that kind of bottleneck, and where they are, we should regulate or break them up! Abundants are totally in agreement with the anti-monopoly folks on that!
The tension between abundance vs. small business seems pretty clear to me. Infrastructure doesn't *differentially* help small business, and while deregulation can help, the absolute most it can do is allow small business and big business to compete on a level playing field—in which case big business will win easily. The only way small business can win in most sectors is if regulators specifically put a thumb on the scale in its favor, and the abundance people are generally against that.
Yeah this is the point that the most-committed anti-monopoly folks seem to have an _aesthetic_ preference for small businesses, even if they're truly less efficient. Abundants just want a level playing field, where big players can't wield bigness itself to drive smaller players from the field.
The anti-monopolists point to a variety of real cases where big players are doing that kind of thing, like Amazon's "if you want to list on Amazon, you can't list a lower price at another store", which forced vendors to price in Prime's free shipping, and not advertise the true price absent the shipping costs anywhere elsewhere. A lot of Abundants agree that pro-competition policymakers should intervene to stop that kind of thing, and anti-trust law should be used to break up niche roll-up monopolies (like Varsity Brands in cheer sport). We just wouldn't necessarily go so far as saying that Amazon itself needs to be cracked up into separate divisons. If they operate efficiently as an "everything store", without abusing vendors and customers, that's fine.