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.
"the only way small business can win in most sectors is if regulators specifically puts a thumb on the scale..."
This is false and wrong-headed - speaking both as an economist and a small business (multiple small business) owner-entrepreneur.
Small businesses regularly compete with large businesses on niches, and on niche to scale offerings as like in customer service offering (be that B2B or B2C), bespoke products etc.
Regulation virtually always adds documentary and bureaucratic complexity that large businesses (or larger businesses) much more easily are able to address - and as I have seen in many markets exploit bureaucrats regulatory 'small biz' preferences via 'fake' Small biz cut outs where the larger enterprise is really the operator behind and Small biz is a Face only - the large enterprises being able to address documentary burden from regulations which as Noah notes they can easily price in and spread specialised bureauratic processing staff experience and knowledge across multi-activities.
Small business support not via control regulations but advantageous financing supports, and assistance in access funding, simplified small biz procedures, etc. - Simplfication not regulation.
Red Tape is virtually always a competitive advantage for large sized businesses, Abundance agenda for simplification is something I am enormously enthusiastic about from direct lived business experience.
Further it is quite wrong-headed to assert Infrastructure doesn't differentially help small business versus large.
Large firms can and do create own in-house infra and are able to spread costs for bespoke own-in-house infra (be that power developments or on-site infra in energy or site-roads) across budgets and have financing and staffing depth to address.
Small business never do - and public infra is enormously game changing - literally permitting the otherwise impossible. The opportunity opening potential of publicly accessible infra - be it power or roads or telecoms - for small business is multiples of that for a large firm.
Agreed, access to cheap capital is more important than regulations favoring small businesses. All the small, minority-owned, veteran-owned, women-owned, etc regulations seem to favor the most dishonest and those with the time to jump through hoops.
Cheap capital -and particularly Working Capital!! not just investment credit but ctritically but very risky for lenders, Working Capital that small bizes really need as life-lines to survive contract / payment variability and delays. WC tends to get downplayed versus investment credit (see SBA very heavily to investment credit and it's collasal pain to access their WC support), but WC is really critical. Not that I want to bag overly on investment credit, it is more important but WC access I think could be better promoted for Small Biz - along with regulatory streamlining to help mitigate delays on new assets, etc.
I won't myself take a conclusion on favoring the most dishonest - although complex rule-sets for things that are not easily monitored I think tend to create opportunity for scammily gaming system where one has strong chances of having Bad money driving out Good effect....
But absolutely without ambiguity theoretically beneficial rule-sets that try to slice and dice advantages in ways that may abstractly have some justification are (a) burdens and hurdles (I recall recently reading (b) become themselves sources of rent-seeking that advantage the Incumbent over the Newcomer which tends to reduce opportunity potential for the newcomers, lock in middle elites....
Bureacrats and people who've not been on their own as an entrepreneur tend to hugely underestimate overall impact - usually to my experience by nit-picking over effects by not having a really holistic understanding that any single rule or reg may not be so bad in theory but such things tend to stack-and-stack and then the bureacracy that applies such rules is naturally (not to pick on the bureaucrats staffing, they respond to getting beaten on!) add in more conservative protective practice that typically adds "cruft" of process and documentation for protection against the system gamers....
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.
Banning specific practices (as like the Amazon listing one cited) that are anti-competitive in themselves - versus merely being against Big becasue Big is Powerful and Powerful is Bad (political logic in e
Economies of scale are important source of wealth of course, so Amazon as Amazon should be left alone, as you say "if they operate efficiently ... without abusing vendors or customers"[where abusing is action like you cite that are anti-market transprency clearly trying to disguise own-cost], Amazon leveraging platform to force vendors to disguise Amazon own Prime pricing insert is another matter, anti-competitive and anti-market transparency and is def something worhty of action.
Support to small biz as option on new options (dynamism, promoting wider entrepreneurial culture etc) is something Noah has cited in past writing as important indirect or longer-term factor for broad economic-culture dynamism beyond near-term efficiencies - looking at international economic patterns as well - is an important option as balance to not being anti-large operators, but giving attention to small operators and level playing fields (and even reasonable advantage to small operators to preserve market future options even if much of small biz is "churn")
The original assertion that infra and regulatory streamlining don't differentially help Small biz , and asserting small biz can only compete if there is regulatory thumb on scale is however nonsense.
I don't think it's primarily just an aesthetic thing, I think it's that small business is good *for small business owners* and so promotion of small business kinda makes sense from a "producer-centric socialist" perspective. See Matt Bruenig: https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/the-problem-with-bossbabe-leftism
There’s also a political economy thing here, I suppose. Small business owners are influential in their communities, precisely because their business is small enough for them to be _personally familiar_ with lots of people among their customer base, their employees, etc. They’re “pillars of the community”, in a way that the local territory manager for MegaCorp is not.
The most successful small businesses that win become big businesses. We should not prevent that by putting our thumbs on the scale.
We should however have a regulatory environment that is conducive to small businesses. Currently we don’t do that. We say the value of the regulation outweighs the destruction to small businesses. We should stop doing that.
There is a MASSIVE difference between supporting small business directly via grants, cheap loans, regulatory forbearance (etc.) on the one hand, and supporting small business indirectly by distorting antitrust law to make competitive acts by large firms illegal. The former can be sensible (exempting small businesses from certain labor laws that ought to apply to all employers feels non-sensible); the latter is nonsense that will do nothing but make us poorer.
The way to see this explicitly is the anti-monopolists' (like Teachout) support for enforcing the Robinson-Patman Act. That Act targets differential pricing--a supplier charges one (typically lower) price to Walmart and another (typically higher) price to mom and pop. The statute was terribly drafted, and it's often very hard to defend any supplier's price difference to different retailers even though the statute does provide for some defenses. The upshot is that enforcing the Act almost always results in Walmart (and its customers) paying the higher prices charged to mom and pop, not the other way around. Yes, this is how it works: Walmart's customers pay higher prices for Coca-cola products so that mom and pop can make more Coca-cola sales (because they won't be undercut by Walmart) and earn higher profits. It is a direct transfer from Walmart's customers to small business owners. Teachout and her ilk think this is good! Once upon a time, the FTC led the charge at the federal level in arguing that state occupational licensing restrictions raise prices for the goods/services supplied by the licensed professions, often without any demonstrable improvement in quality. When Lina Khan became Chair of the FTC, all that work stopped. Why? Lina Khan thinks occupational licensing is a good thing because it increases wages for those who work in the licensed professions! It doesn't matter if consumers pay higher prices, or fewer people can work in the licensed professions. This same logic is what leads to support for rent control (is anyone surprised Mandami has Khan on his transition team)?
In general, the lodestar for anti-monopolists is inflicting pain on the so-called "monopolists" (they do not have a parsimonious definition of "monopoly"--they routinely call firms "monopolists" even when they face robust competition). They necessarily oppose "abundance" because the goal of abundance is for there to be more stuff available at cheaper prices. It is often the case that a large business can make more stuff at cheaper prices because economies of scale are a real thing that exist. But they cannot support a policy where a plausible outcome is a large business increases output (and therefore possibly increases profits) because the main goal is to inflict pain on large businesses to reduce their "power" or something. They are fools.
Small businesses absolutely can and do compete successfully on a level playing field. They can do this they way any business competes--better quality, better price, better service, etc. But if deregulation happens to help a large business increase profits at the same time it helps a small business do the same, then the anti-monopolists cannot support it because it doesn't scratch the itch they are clawing at.
The progressive regulators already put the thumb on the scale to exclude small businesses from many of their beloved regulations, but much of that is corrupted (see the California fast-food minimum wage rules that exclude some small restaurants, but also any who specifically sell stand-alone bread - and that’s a specific corruption added by Gavin Newsome who gets big political donations from the CEO of Panera). And even with many thumbs (like the anti-abundance Biden rules that favor business that are owned by disadvantaged groups, or are union friendly, or promise to use green energy) the regulations impose costs in money and time, which of course big corporations take advantage of.
I spent most of my career inside a very large company, and I lost count of how many small business owners would—politely—suggest that people in big organizations don’t really know what they’re doing.
The line was usually some version of: “You’re a bureaucracy. It takes you multiples of time and people to do what I can do quickly.” You sure big business win easily?
My take is that the conflict various groups (anti-monopolists, left redistributionists) have with abundance is argued in bad faith. I don’t think these groups actually have a problem with abundance goals or even means (effective bureaucracy, logical regulation to boost supply). Instead what these groups don’t like is that abundance is creating political competition for power they thought that, in the current populist age, that they’d win basically by default. It doesn’t matter that abundance’s supply side policies don’t conflict with anti monopoly or leftist redistribution approaches. This is about power and who gets to set priorities. The left wants their organizations and people to be the ones making decisions. They don’t want to have to prove why it should be them.
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!
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?
#4 Fraud: an optimistic viewpoint would be that republicans were anti-auditors because they felt they would be targeted by the auditors. If they now feel that isn’t the case maybe the will be more open to auditors.
Great point about maths. It's taken me ages to get any good at maths because I was never made to focus on the importance of detailed operations - which for me were that worst of combinations, boring and difficult (in the sense of being far less forgiving than words).
Falling rents might lead to a building boom if lower rents translate into lower property prices attracting developers - especially if local authorities are simultaneously pursuing an abundance agenda in response to the problems which led to rents falling.
A developer buys land and spends money to build houses or apartments on the land and sell them to end users other businesses that will then rent them out. If rents go down, it’s because lower demand from renters. Landlords will lower the rent to fill the units they own, but they will be less inclined to buy new units from developers, so they will respond by not building more that they can sell, or lowering prices on completed units (although this will impact the loans they need to repay). Less building activity may reduce the value of vacant land by a little, since developers are buying less, but that small reduction in the land price won’t override the other fixed costs, regulations and reduced demand from landlords.
So not a case of 'buy low, sell high' but 'buy high (or at least rising), sell higher'. Developments like St Catherine's Dock, Canary Wharf and King's Cross in London are the exceptions, I guess.
I think the "yuppie fishtank" hypothesis doesn't hold water for global cities. Nashville and Austin et al can bring down rents overall by build baby build, but in San Francisco, New York, London etc. any new high-rise housing is more likely to be scooped up by global wealth and kept empty as a hedge against uncertainty in their home countries - let's call this the Peter Thiel Effect. I don't know but I am guessing that this is the fate of Vancouver, which has built up the wazoo but still the rent keeps rising.
Is it not obvious that the left-NIMBYs basically want an equivalent to the Soviet propiska or Chinese hukou systems by which the government would dictate where people live?
I generally prefer a smaller government footprint with two major exceptions. A large number of federal auditors checking the eligibility for and performance of recipients of federal money will make me much happier about the social safety nets, and a well-funded IRS to assure me that my honest efforts to pay my taxes isn’t stupidity on my part.
I agree with a lot of the principals of abundance, but don’t feel that the leaders have credibility. It feels like a movement that can be astroturfed into deregulation only, where current big players can get more spoils without facilitating lower costs to end users, jobs, better outcomes. I’m still cynical about Obama turning out to be mostly neoliberal, not making structural reforms to the fed or banks, not making big changes to healthcare costs, and not challenging any of the consolidation that has given us enshittified big tech.
#2. You say "the housing being built in these increasingly affordable boom-towns is almost entirely market-rate housing, or what anti-housing activists often pejoratively refer to as “luxury” housing." Don't forget that the *advertising* usually calls this new housing "luxury", even if it's only mid-middle-class!
#4. This section is titled "The U.S. government gets defrauded too often" but most of the fraud seems to be in state-run programs, which may be a significant point.
#5. One problem I've seen described in US math education is the focus on trying to get students to *discover* mathematics rather than simply learn it. Being a mathematician myself, I know that discovering is *much* slower than learning what others have discovered. And I suspect that the "remediation" that seems to help kids a lot is much more focused on rote drill than the typical US mathematics curriculum.
#1. A problem with this analysis is that pharmacies don't make money anymore. I've been watching the grumblings in the Boston Globe over a number of years, and the summary is that pharmacies per se are loss leaders for convenience stores. E.g. the CVS chain is credited with being in much better financial shape than Walgreen's because more of its total sales is "front of store" merchandise. One consequence is that pharmacy chains are squeezing the pharmacy workers more, and the workers are getting disgruntled.
Exactly *why* pharmacies are unprofitable isn't well-analyzed but it seems likely that it's because a large fraction of prescriptions are bought through pharmacy benefit managers, and the PBM business is much more concentrated (monopsonized) than the pharmacy business, so the pharmacies are whittled down to break-even prices.
Another problem is even considering the goal of "move back to their home town and open a small business in one of its abandoned storefronts". After all, one of the major values of abundance is enabling people to move from areas of declining economic productivity to areas of increasing economic productivity, just as the abstract subject of the tweet did in his younger years. This is consonant with a large number of mass migrations in US history, and such abandonment of impoverished areas is probably a cause of the US's relative wealth.
In practice, in declining areas, the cost of housing and other real estate is rarely more than the cost of building more, and often well less that that.
What the tweeter really wants is for the (relative) decline of such areas to cease, but that can't be done without either freezing technological change in the economy (to maintain the profitability of declining industries) or *non-abundance* forcing rising industries to move away from the industry clusters they would prefer to to be located in.
Some time ago, for a reason I no longer remember, I became involved with a remedial math program at a state university which targeted university students who were not prepared for pre-algebra, typically seventh or eighth grade curriculum. These students were told that they suffered from "math anxiety" and were no more responsible for this condition than they would be if they were diabetic. The curriculum was what many of us would have had in elementary school, such as fractions and simple percents. When these students completed tasks such as adding fractions or simple computations, they received a great deal of praise. This reminded me of Jerome Bruner's statement that the purpose of education is not to produce self-confident fools. A recent article in Discover magazine addressed the Dunning-Kruger effect, which also seems applicable here.
More innovation is needed to lower the cost of building homes in older dense cities. The cities with more homes built have vacant land. What does Japan do?
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.
"the only way small business can win in most sectors is if regulators specifically puts a thumb on the scale..."
This is false and wrong-headed - speaking both as an economist and a small business (multiple small business) owner-entrepreneur.
Small businesses regularly compete with large businesses on niches, and on niche to scale offerings as like in customer service offering (be that B2B or B2C), bespoke products etc.
Regulation virtually always adds documentary and bureaucratic complexity that large businesses (or larger businesses) much more easily are able to address - and as I have seen in many markets exploit bureaucrats regulatory 'small biz' preferences via 'fake' Small biz cut outs where the larger enterprise is really the operator behind and Small biz is a Face only - the large enterprises being able to address documentary burden from regulations which as Noah notes they can easily price in and spread specialised bureauratic processing staff experience and knowledge across multi-activities.
Small business support not via control regulations but advantageous financing supports, and assistance in access funding, simplified small biz procedures, etc. - Simplfication not regulation.
Red Tape is virtually always a competitive advantage for large sized businesses, Abundance agenda for simplification is something I am enormously enthusiastic about from direct lived business experience.
Further it is quite wrong-headed to assert Infrastructure doesn't differentially help small business versus large.
Large firms can and do create own in-house infra and are able to spread costs for bespoke own-in-house infra (be that power developments or on-site infra in energy or site-roads) across budgets and have financing and staffing depth to address.
Small business never do - and public infra is enormously game changing - literally permitting the otherwise impossible. The opportunity opening potential of publicly accessible infra - be it power or roads or telecoms - for small business is multiples of that for a large firm.
Agreed, access to cheap capital is more important than regulations favoring small businesses. All the small, minority-owned, veteran-owned, women-owned, etc regulations seem to favor the most dishonest and those with the time to jump through hoops.
Cheap capital -and particularly Working Capital!! not just investment credit but ctritically but very risky for lenders, Working Capital that small bizes really need as life-lines to survive contract / payment variability and delays. WC tends to get downplayed versus investment credit (see SBA very heavily to investment credit and it's collasal pain to access their WC support), but WC is really critical. Not that I want to bag overly on investment credit, it is more important but WC access I think could be better promoted for Small Biz - along with regulatory streamlining to help mitigate delays on new assets, etc.
I won't myself take a conclusion on favoring the most dishonest - although complex rule-sets for things that are not easily monitored I think tend to create opportunity for scammily gaming system where one has strong chances of having Bad money driving out Good effect....
But absolutely without ambiguity theoretically beneficial rule-sets that try to slice and dice advantages in ways that may abstractly have some justification are (a) burdens and hurdles (I recall recently reading (b) become themselves sources of rent-seeking that advantage the Incumbent over the Newcomer which tends to reduce opportunity potential for the newcomers, lock in middle elites....
Bureacrats and people who've not been on their own as an entrepreneur tend to hugely underestimate overall impact - usually to my experience by nit-picking over effects by not having a really holistic understanding that any single rule or reg may not be so bad in theory but such things tend to stack-and-stack and then the bureacracy that applies such rules is naturally (not to pick on the bureaucrats staffing, they respond to getting beaten on!) add in more conservative protective practice that typically adds "cruft" of process and documentation for protection against the system gamers....
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.
This I would agree with
Banning specific practices (as like the Amazon listing one cited) that are anti-competitive in themselves - versus merely being against Big becasue Big is Powerful and Powerful is Bad (political logic in e
Economies of scale are important source of wealth of course, so Amazon as Amazon should be left alone, as you say "if they operate efficiently ... without abusing vendors or customers"[where abusing is action like you cite that are anti-market transprency clearly trying to disguise own-cost], Amazon leveraging platform to force vendors to disguise Amazon own Prime pricing insert is another matter, anti-competitive and anti-market transparency and is def something worhty of action.
Support to small biz as option on new options (dynamism, promoting wider entrepreneurial culture etc) is something Noah has cited in past writing as important indirect or longer-term factor for broad economic-culture dynamism beyond near-term efficiencies - looking at international economic patterns as well - is an important option as balance to not being anti-large operators, but giving attention to small operators and level playing fields (and even reasonable advantage to small operators to preserve market future options even if much of small biz is "churn")
The original assertion that infra and regulatory streamlining don't differentially help Small biz , and asserting small biz can only compete if there is regulatory thumb on scale is however nonsense.
I don't think it's primarily just an aesthetic thing, I think it's that small business is good *for small business owners* and so promotion of small business kinda makes sense from a "producer-centric socialist" perspective. See Matt Bruenig: https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/the-problem-with-bossbabe-leftism
There’s also a political economy thing here, I suppose. Small business owners are influential in their communities, precisely because their business is small enough for them to be _personally familiar_ with lots of people among their customer base, their employees, etc. They’re “pillars of the community”, in a way that the local territory manager for MegaCorp is not.
The most successful small businesses that win become big businesses. We should not prevent that by putting our thumbs on the scale.
We should however have a regulatory environment that is conducive to small businesses. Currently we don’t do that. We say the value of the regulation outweighs the destruction to small businesses. We should stop doing that.
There is a MASSIVE difference between supporting small business directly via grants, cheap loans, regulatory forbearance (etc.) on the one hand, and supporting small business indirectly by distorting antitrust law to make competitive acts by large firms illegal. The former can be sensible (exempting small businesses from certain labor laws that ought to apply to all employers feels non-sensible); the latter is nonsense that will do nothing but make us poorer.
The way to see this explicitly is the anti-monopolists' (like Teachout) support for enforcing the Robinson-Patman Act. That Act targets differential pricing--a supplier charges one (typically lower) price to Walmart and another (typically higher) price to mom and pop. The statute was terribly drafted, and it's often very hard to defend any supplier's price difference to different retailers even though the statute does provide for some defenses. The upshot is that enforcing the Act almost always results in Walmart (and its customers) paying the higher prices charged to mom and pop, not the other way around. Yes, this is how it works: Walmart's customers pay higher prices for Coca-cola products so that mom and pop can make more Coca-cola sales (because they won't be undercut by Walmart) and earn higher profits. It is a direct transfer from Walmart's customers to small business owners. Teachout and her ilk think this is good! Once upon a time, the FTC led the charge at the federal level in arguing that state occupational licensing restrictions raise prices for the goods/services supplied by the licensed professions, often without any demonstrable improvement in quality. When Lina Khan became Chair of the FTC, all that work stopped. Why? Lina Khan thinks occupational licensing is a good thing because it increases wages for those who work in the licensed professions! It doesn't matter if consumers pay higher prices, or fewer people can work in the licensed professions. This same logic is what leads to support for rent control (is anyone surprised Mandami has Khan on his transition team)?
In general, the lodestar for anti-monopolists is inflicting pain on the so-called "monopolists" (they do not have a parsimonious definition of "monopoly"--they routinely call firms "monopolists" even when they face robust competition). They necessarily oppose "abundance" because the goal of abundance is for there to be more stuff available at cheaper prices. It is often the case that a large business can make more stuff at cheaper prices because economies of scale are a real thing that exist. But they cannot support a policy where a plausible outcome is a large business increases output (and therefore possibly increases profits) because the main goal is to inflict pain on large businesses to reduce their "power" or something. They are fools.
Small businesses absolutely can and do compete successfully on a level playing field. They can do this they way any business competes--better quality, better price, better service, etc. But if deregulation happens to help a large business increase profits at the same time it helps a small business do the same, then the anti-monopolists cannot support it because it doesn't scratch the itch they are clawing at.
The progressive regulators already put the thumb on the scale to exclude small businesses from many of their beloved regulations, but much of that is corrupted (see the California fast-food minimum wage rules that exclude some small restaurants, but also any who specifically sell stand-alone bread - and that’s a specific corruption added by Gavin Newsome who gets big political donations from the CEO of Panera). And even with many thumbs (like the anti-abundance Biden rules that favor business that are owned by disadvantaged groups, or are union friendly, or promise to use green energy) the regulations impose costs in money and time, which of course big corporations take advantage of.
I spent most of my career inside a very large company, and I lost count of how many small business owners would—politely—suggest that people in big organizations don’t really know what they’re doing.
The line was usually some version of: “You’re a bureaucracy. It takes you multiples of time and people to do what I can do quickly.” You sure big business win easily?
My take is that the conflict various groups (anti-monopolists, left redistributionists) have with abundance is argued in bad faith. I don’t think these groups actually have a problem with abundance goals or even means (effective bureaucracy, logical regulation to boost supply). Instead what these groups don’t like is that abundance is creating political competition for power they thought that, in the current populist age, that they’d win basically by default. It doesn’t matter that abundance’s supply side policies don’t conflict with anti monopoly or leftist redistribution approaches. This is about power and who gets to set priorities. The left wants their organizations and people to be the ones making decisions. They don’t want to have to prove why it should be them.
Maybe we need antitrust to break up the political monopoly held by these anti-abundance groups.
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!
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?
#4 Fraud: an optimistic viewpoint would be that republicans were anti-auditors because they felt they would be targeted by the auditors. If they now feel that isn’t the case maybe the will be more open to auditors.
Great point about maths. It's taken me ages to get any good at maths because I was never made to focus on the importance of detailed operations - which for me were that worst of combinations, boring and difficult (in the sense of being far less forgiving than words).
Falling rents might lead to a building boom if lower rents translate into lower property prices attracting developers - especially if local authorities are simultaneously pursuing an abundance agenda in response to the problems which led to rents falling.
*rising rents lead to a building boom. High property prices attract developers. Low property prices repel developers.
A developer buys land and spends money to build houses or apartments on the land and sell them to end users other businesses that will then rent them out. If rents go down, it’s because lower demand from renters. Landlords will lower the rent to fill the units they own, but they will be less inclined to buy new units from developers, so they will respond by not building more that they can sell, or lowering prices on completed units (although this will impact the loans they need to repay). Less building activity may reduce the value of vacant land by a little, since developers are buying less, but that small reduction in the land price won’t override the other fixed costs, regulations and reduced demand from landlords.
So not a case of 'buy low, sell high' but 'buy high (or at least rising), sell higher'. Developments like St Catherine's Dock, Canary Wharf and King's Cross in London are the exceptions, I guess.
I think the "yuppie fishtank" hypothesis doesn't hold water for global cities. Nashville and Austin et al can bring down rents overall by build baby build, but in San Francisco, New York, London etc. any new high-rise housing is more likely to be scooped up by global wealth and kept empty as a hedge against uncertainty in their home countries - let's call this the Peter Thiel Effect. I don't know but I am guessing that this is the fate of Vancouver, which has built up the wazoo but still the rent keeps rising.
Is it not obvious that the left-NIMBYs basically want an equivalent to the Soviet propiska or Chinese hukou systems by which the government would dictate where people live?
I generally prefer a smaller government footprint with two major exceptions. A large number of federal auditors checking the eligibility for and performance of recipients of federal money will make me much happier about the social safety nets, and a well-funded IRS to assure me that my honest efforts to pay my taxes isn’t stupidity on my part.
Dude, I think your fact check team is failing here. China is not 4x the size of US. In fact US is larger in area than China. Do you mean population?
He obviously meant population.
I agree with a lot of the principals of abundance, but don’t feel that the leaders have credibility. It feels like a movement that can be astroturfed into deregulation only, where current big players can get more spoils without facilitating lower costs to end users, jobs, better outcomes. I’m still cynical about Obama turning out to be mostly neoliberal, not making structural reforms to the fed or banks, not making big changes to healthcare costs, and not challenging any of the consolidation that has given us enshittified big tech.
#2. You say "the housing being built in these increasingly affordable boom-towns is almost entirely market-rate housing, or what anti-housing activists often pejoratively refer to as “luxury” housing." Don't forget that the *advertising* usually calls this new housing "luxury", even if it's only mid-middle-class!
#4. This section is titled "The U.S. government gets defrauded too often" but most of the fraud seems to be in state-run programs, which may be a significant point.
#5. One problem I've seen described in US math education is the focus on trying to get students to *discover* mathematics rather than simply learn it. Being a mathematician myself, I know that discovering is *much* slower than learning what others have discovered. And I suspect that the "remediation" that seems to help kids a lot is much more focused on rote drill than the typical US mathematics curriculum.
#1. A problem with this analysis is that pharmacies don't make money anymore. I've been watching the grumblings in the Boston Globe over a number of years, and the summary is that pharmacies per se are loss leaders for convenience stores. E.g. the CVS chain is credited with being in much better financial shape than Walgreen's because more of its total sales is "front of store" merchandise. One consequence is that pharmacy chains are squeezing the pharmacy workers more, and the workers are getting disgruntled.
Exactly *why* pharmacies are unprofitable isn't well-analyzed but it seems likely that it's because a large fraction of prescriptions are bought through pharmacy benefit managers, and the PBM business is much more concentrated (monopsonized) than the pharmacy business, so the pharmacies are whittled down to break-even prices.
Another problem is even considering the goal of "move back to their home town and open a small business in one of its abandoned storefronts". After all, one of the major values of abundance is enabling people to move from areas of declining economic productivity to areas of increasing economic productivity, just as the abstract subject of the tweet did in his younger years. This is consonant with a large number of mass migrations in US history, and such abandonment of impoverished areas is probably a cause of the US's relative wealth.
In practice, in declining areas, the cost of housing and other real estate is rarely more than the cost of building more, and often well less that that.
What the tweeter really wants is for the (relative) decline of such areas to cease, but that can't be done without either freezing technological change in the economy (to maintain the profitability of declining industries) or *non-abundance* forcing rising industries to move away from the industry clusters they would prefer to to be located in.
Some time ago, for a reason I no longer remember, I became involved with a remedial math program at a state university which targeted university students who were not prepared for pre-algebra, typically seventh or eighth grade curriculum. These students were told that they suffered from "math anxiety" and were no more responsible for this condition than they would be if they were diabetic. The curriculum was what many of us would have had in elementary school, such as fractions and simple percents. When these students completed tasks such as adding fractions or simple computations, they received a great deal of praise. This reminded me of Jerome Bruner's statement that the purpose of education is not to produce self-confident fools. A recent article in Discover magazine addressed the Dunning-Kruger effect, which also seems applicable here.
More innovation is needed to lower the cost of building homes in older dense cities. The cities with more homes built have vacant land. What does Japan do?