In #1, you have a literal graph of an overwhelming majority of US adults believing that Elon Musk, a Big Tech billionaire, has too much influence over the US government.
Then in #5, you write "the real threat was that companies like Facebook and Google would usurp democracy itself" as if this is somehow crying wolf...
We literally have a tech billionaire getting access and control (according to his own tweets) of vast swathes of the US government.
How do you reconcile the "these silly antitrust people were wrong to worry about the political power of big tech" in point #5, with the the "the US government is going through a massive chaos blitz, much of it based on the design and guidance of a big tech billionaire based on the practices of his big tech company"?
The specific point about AI regulation vis a vis China is fine and it is convincing, but Lina Khan being wrong about the competitive advantages or disadvantages in one piece of the tech ecosystem, doesn't make the larger worry about the political power of big tech wrong.
1. Tesla isn't a tech monopolies of the kind Lina Khan target. SpaceX maybe, but you're going to have hard time arguing that they've been bad for space technology, or the US broadly. Twitter, maybe, once was, but if anything Elon vastly reduced their monopolistic network effect.
2. Elon isn't powerful because he's a tech multi-billionaire, he's a powerful because, a. he's a multi-billionaire, b. he has by far the most impressive resume of building massively successful organizations of any American in the last 20 years, and c. He's aligned himself with Trump by being the same type of asshole Trump is. These are all separate from the question of how to regulate big tech companies broadly.
I don't see how, say, breaking up Google or Meta would prevent the risk of Sergei Brinn or Mark Zuckerberg from pulling an Elon.
See, this is an example of the kind of context/reconciliation that I would have liked to see in Noah's article.
If Noah believes that Elon's companies aren't really the type of Big Tech that Khan was talking about, he should say so and say why he thinks that.
If he has a rationale for thinking that Elon's ascent to the commanding heights of the US government isn't an example of "Monopolistic Tech Corporate Power ----> Political Power," then that should be clearly said.
As it is, the reader is left with "These tech anti trust people were crying wolf (about tech company billionaires seizing political power). In totally unrelated news, a four legged pack animal with sharp teeth is now tearing apart our sheep." There are arguments to be made on why these are unrelated, but none of those arguments are made.
Musk’s situation has much more to do with his celebrity and the moral depravity of Donald Trump, than the ability of tech companies to usurp democracy. If Tom Brady had come to Trump with the DOGE plan, Trump would have let him do it.
Under Noah's 'Too many Americans still fear the future' post this issue also came up in the comments. While Noah claims that 'Lina Khan misunderstands competition', the real insight here seems to be that Noah Smith misunderstands power. Not surprising, as economists have somehow tried to create a conceptual separation between 'the market' or 'the economy' and the rest of human society (including politics). As if markets do not arise from, and are not intertwined with the rest of society and its political-institutional systems (and ecological environment, for that matter).
Musk is the first obvious example, as you pointed out. But from a political perspective the 'competition' between US big tech is practically irrelevant anyway, as they all work according to the same politics of 'we can break whatever rules and ethical considerations we want for the sake of profits and you can't do anything to stop me', and together control a sizeable number of (related) markets. The more rules Trump & Musk dump, the more big tech lawyers get to dictate through contracts and the kind of 'tick this box to confirm your acceptance of a 1000 page user agreement which describes in incomprehensible manner how you hand over your soul to us' styled power grabs.
Also, pointing out OpenAI as competition is kind of ignoring the fact that Microsoft rules there, but whatever. We could also mention players like Blackrock and Vanguard, but at this moment I'm too lazy to argue why that's relevant.
But, to just throw out some numbers: Apple and Google control maybe 99% of the smartphone OS 'market'? Microsoft and Apple a slightly lower percentage of computer OS 'market'. In the Netherlands 66% of all government organizations (and other semi-public institutions) use e-mail and cloudservices from Microsoft, another 10% use Google. Numbers might be slightly different in other countries, I don't really know, but there's probably significant dependence on these players everywhere.
The big five of US big tech are at the moment investing hundreds of billions in cloud infrastructure (including lots of localized corruption, appropriation of water and energy resources, etc. etc.).
The somewhat pessimistic, but also not unlikely scenario is that these companies are slowly moving their software, which everyone uses, towards the clouds they own. Then they'll continue pushing on hardware providers (which depend on the OS they provide) to adapt hardware specs so that reliance on cloud systems becomes even bigger, as local compute becomes smaller. And then try and move away from their closed ecosystems.... (while competitors are continuously being bought by the cloud giants...).
I don’t think you understand power. Smartphones mostly depend on Apple or Google operating systems, but how does that give them power over what a user does with a phone? Apple is privacy focused and uses end to end encryption, meaning they can’t even see your data, although the UK government is trying to force them to put in a backdoor that would allow them, or other governments, like the PRC to spy on all their users data. I would rather Apple had the power to protect its customers data from government surveillance , than if the government had similar control of the data. Even if Apple could see the data, the worst they could do is use it for marketing, the governments like the PRC can use it to lock you or your friends up or kill you.
PRC is a great example of my point that you can't see political power separate from market power, considering that their meteoric rise as global superpower was mostly based on them becoming the factory of the world. But sure, they're probably more powerful than US based big tech. That doesn't make big tech any less so... Even though they have, for now, mostly used that power to make money and further cement their positions of power.
Remember the good old days when Microsoft stopped the support for Windows XP and suddenly governments across the world had to scramble to update their shit and pay Microsoft loads of money because police and military forces where running on that stuff... Anyways Mr. Gates himself is now a global power player who has earned this position through market power and his faithful cashcow Microsoft. With the COVID pandemic some Oxford researchers wanted to give the vaccine they developed to the world without patents, which works great with the flu vaccine for which every new strain is shared and every capable facility can start production straight away, but Mr. Gates said 'no' because of his pro market politics. Just one example.
Google and Apple do decide what your phone can do, luckily they're not currently managed by a madman like Musk. Now they mostly focus on what is sold on their stores, and grab 30% of every transaction while they're at it. So in a way they have some sway over how you use your phones. Also on what the future of phones will be; what is best for the customer, or what is best for them? Considering that they pulled up the old psychologist's /casino's playbook of making this stuff more addictive, I'm not sure...
Google search also decides which websites you will visit; not the ones with the best info, but the ones they make most money on. Unfortunate, because their engine used to be quite nice, back in the days.
Apple also once was a customer centered organization who made lots of money from making cool and innovative stuff, unfortunately those days also seem to be over. Which brings us back to the PRC, considering that Apple basically gave away control over the production of their phones.
For now these companies just use their power to make money, fine. But as I said, 75% of Dutch government organizations uses Microsoft and Google for cloud services, which ultimately gives them the power to cut off these institutions of the access to their data. So yes, they have power. And loads of it. And it's not getting any less.
I had hoped like the current situation should be a moment for commentators to revisit their past opinions and compare them to ground truth now that we’re here. But I guess that’s not happening.
“Oh well, maybe a cartel of wealthy tech accelerations has seized control of Washington DC and is wildly disrupting it, but at least on the bright side the folks who poo-pooed the idea that this could happen will adjust their priors.” It feels like in 2025 nobody ever does that: we can just assert that the thing visibly happening isn’t happening, or hint that if it is happening then it’s actually the fault of the people who were warning about it.
As far as AI goes, let’s be realistic. US AI firms have absolutely been hinting around the idea that they might like protections for a while, long before DeepSeek. Those include protections from open source models. Hints of this appear in the Biden AI policy, such as registration of large models, though fortunately we didn’t get most of it into law/action. It’s also worth understanding that real players in this industry are not just OpenAI and Anthropic, but business partners like Microsoft that intend to monetize their output.
All big corporations like to use the government to shield them from competitors and maybe have it go after them as well. That doesn’t mean the government should help them. Biden and Khan were supporting the AI incumbents with their AI safety regulation order, which Trump overturned on his first day. Financial incentives led Newsome to refuse to sign similar AI regulations in California.
There are many companies developing AI models and applications, including many startups. Big AI models are being made by OpenAI, Anthropic, Alphabet, Meta, XAi, and Microsoft (separate from OpenAI). Apple has Apple Intelligence which uses various models. Tesla and Waymo have driving focused AI models. Many smaller companies make special models for video, music, robotics and more.
DeepSeek, Baidu, Alibaba, Moonshot AI are competing from PRC and Mistral from France. No matter what safety regulations or antitrust rules are put in place by the US, I don’t expect China or Europe to abide by them
I think it's funny that you think the Trump administration is going to distort the AI market less than Biden. Clearly it will choose favored companies and then use Federal funds and power to promote and protect them. It's just that the form of that favor won't be spelled out in an EO that has various semi-transparent goals, it'll be based on payoffs and graft.
1) Large companies amass immense political capability. Governments should protect against ones that use this power in societally harmful ways.
2) Large companies are per se bad because they have political power. Fight all large companies.
Noah is addressing #2. Khan's original argument sounded like #1: here are ways other than consumer welfare/pricing to assess harms in the context of antitrust. But in practice she and her ilk have behaved according to #2. To do so, they've made ridiculous arguments that were thrown out by the courts. For four years they succeeded by putting a chill over tech M&A, but will probably have a long-term counterproductive impact by undermining support for #1.
Thanks for following up with a question, which is the best way to engage in the comments!
Do you think companies should not have political power? If not, how much?
Your question feels binary. it’s obviously to me a question of degree. I personally think large corporations have too much power and disadvantaged citizens not enough, so I generally support efforts to rebalance power. My assumption is that accomplishing this would lead to policies I often disagree with, but it’s the right thing to do. I also think that innovation and industry are important engines of well being for society. I don’t mean the cliched “trickle down” view of the right, but a more measured view.
So given this, how would I rebalance power?
1. smarter pro-competitive regulation. In particular, reforms to the power of distributors (widely defined) like mandated pricing transparency and limitations on requiring the sale of their own goods.
2. Intellectual property reform to both reduce protection for the minimal innovations that have created the technology patent trolls industry while also increasing protections for consumer goods. Most of the complaints against Amazon from small businesses are about frustration that somebody copied their product, which had not intellectual property protection. If we want innovation in consumer goods, including innovation in the US, we should reward innovators. But only to a degree. Taken too far it becomes anti-competitive.
3. We need some sort of law for IT platform technologies that mandates reasonable openness. The definition of platform should be narrow. The iPhone is a platform, google search is not. For example, something mandating that capabilities on a platform technology have a 3-year exclusivity period after which the platform owner must make them available to others under the same terms as the company itself (e.g. apple can’t just copy the concept of tracking tiles in AirPods and then never let other companies access the best parts).
4. Law increasing the criminal penalties on companies and executives. There’s a book about this called the “Chickenshit Club” that argued that corporate crime is enabled by prosecutors not going after firms. But the book contradicted itself by making it clear that the laws aren’t strong enough and were vulnerable to courts limiting them. The average small-time criminal doesn’t change behavior significantly based on the threat of prison, but large company executives do.
5. Increase taxes with more progressive rates, closer to what existed under Clinton. Fund a much more expansive, “no fault,” unemployment insurance system similar to that in Denmark. The biggest reason companies have power over employees is that people can’t afford to be out of work. This has the perverse effect of degrading industrial efficiency because people stay in jobs they are bad at, not motivated to work hard in, etc..
“ How do you reconcile the "these silly antitrust people were wrong to worry about the political power of big tech" in point #5, with the the "the US government is going through a massive chaos blitz, much of it based on the design and guidance of a big tech billionaire based on the practices of his big tech company"?”
I’m unclear as to why all these people think Elon Musk is not qualified to look at government efficiency. The Warrenites and blue state Democrats don’t seem to take governmental bloat and peri-governmental efficiency seriously despite plenty of pundits howling about it.
Someone is actually doing something about the problem now, whereas for many years politicians talked about cutting waste and fraud, and voters wanted less spending on foreign aid, but nothing was done other than speeches and commissions, at least since Ronald Reagan, and even he didn’t do much about it. It takes someone like Musk who has credibility running productive lean organizations successfully, and the ability to convince Trump to support him to get any real action done on cutting waste and unnecessary spending.
Not seeing Big Techs as problem, while Elon is in the White House and Twitter/Meta have a lot of racist things in their feeds, is ridiculous. It’s kind of a confession of the error your argument that they take government because they were “alienated” and, therefore, they are not a problem. Given that you once encouraged Elon to buy Twitter, and that we now see that such transaction turned out horribly, I think you need some reflection about the subject.
To be more accurate the problem with X and Meta is not so much that racist content is _present_ (that's just freedom of speech) but rather that the owners of those platforms are preferentially pushing it into people's feeds -- either because they are racists themselves, or because they believe that it makes them more money as "enragement drives engagement".
I think it is even worse. Elon and Zuck pushed neofascist content in order to get the political favor of Trump. All so they could not face any regulation in their way of their messianic mission.
Where is your evidence that the owners of these platforms are preferentially pushing this content to users. And even if they are how is that not just an exercise of their freedom of speech?
Hmm, I don’t see racist content in my X feed, unless it is referred to by a post from someone refuting it. Maybe what is in your feed depends on which users you follow and what you respond to.
In my For You feed right now, the posts from people I don’t follow include:
some random guy refuting a post made by Sen Coons, Matty Iglesias posting a defense of Sen Warren, the White House announcing it is Making America Healthy Again, some guy complaining about IRC executive salaries, an ex camp counselor saying people with Down’s syndrome are evil actually (worst one I saw), an ex catholic posting about birth rates, and Pop Crave announcing rumors that Kanye is divorcing his unclothed wife.
Okay, I’ll admit the last post is slightly racist, but just because it mentions Ye, who is one.
Big Tech is bad because a rich guy you don’t like is in the White House and some social media has a few racist posts, so shut it down. When Silvio Berlusconi was running Italy with incompetence and sex parties was that the fault of Big Italian Media?
The consumer confidence drop doesn't shock me. Even the hardcore folks I know that are fully aboard the DOGE and Trump train will make sure to indicate that loyalty in their performative throat clearing, before they talk about their plans to batten down the hatches for economic turmoil. DOGE stans realize they're giving themselves a bloody nose and a few broken teeth to see their enemies lose a couple of limbs.
DOGE cost cutting and better government efficiency isn’t going to harm consumers, it is Trump’s tariffs and crazy tax ideas and deportation of needed workers that will hurt the economy.
What kind of gaslighting is this crap that the people responsible for tech barons wreaking havoc on american democracy are not the tech barons themselves but the people who tried to limit their power?
What's next?
"Honey, I really don't like beating you up, but you give me no other choice, with your trying to go to the police and all."
Between this and Noah denying on a podcast that Elon Musk did the nazi salute I'm beginning to realize that he'll bend over backwards to defend techies no matter what. Not that they'd move a finger to defend him should he need it.
You keep getting the policy ideas behind antitrust reform wrong and at this point I have to assume it’s intentional.
Good lord Noah. The idea that Lina Khan and those that agree with her aren’t concerned about economic impacts of consolidation, especially in big tech, is specious and absurd. Of course we are. We just think antitrust analysis should be returned to its pre-Bork era and freed of the myopic obsession with “consumer prices.”
Excessive consolidation in the tech sector affects far more than “the price of software” as you so memorably put it. It affects wages in the industry, the ability of new entrants to get funding, become competitive, and develop new products, and the ability of the giants to cause unwanted externalities with their behavior to name just a few.
Stopping big tech companies from buying smaller ones will hurt smaller companies whose only path to success would be IPOs or SPACs. And workers in small tech startups (low resources , high effort, low pay, high risk, high reward ) are not the same ones who work in big tech (stability, many resources, high pay).
How would breaking up Alphabet provide better products or wages, they would have to shutdown all their advanced programs, like quantum computing, WayMo and deep mind if they no longer had advertising income from search. Are there startup companies working on quantum computing that would benefit from a breakup?
Stopping anticompetitive mergers wouldn't do anything to affect the IPO market. If anything, exits via IPOs would be more common than they are today if exits via acquisition were less available. That goes for SPACs too, though the use of SPACs has pretty much disappeared for reasons entirely unrelated to competition policy (SEC regulations).
How do you think Google/Alphabet got to be where it is today? One big factor was the antitrust case against Microsoft and the forced unbundling of Internet Explorer that allowed the rise in other browsers like Chrome. Meta exists at the size it is today because when the company was started and had its initial growth, there weren't other social media giants just waiting to snap it up and take over or shut down the product.
Better wages would be achieved by having more companies competing for labor. With more markets open to competition, more startups would be viable and able to get VC funding. That means more places for engineers to be hired. More companies coming into existence and getting funding means more discoveries and advancements.
Silicon Valley is where it is today in large part because of effective antitrust regulation in the middle of the 20th century, as well as California's longstanding policy against non-compete contracts (which is also a competition regulation!). Allowing Big Tech to continue on with its current level of market dominance merely strangles the next evolution of the U.S. tech sector in its crib.
I actually agree that there are anticompetitive impacts from consolidation, particularly in areas related to distribution.
The problem is that "big is bad" was much better at explaining the actions Khan's FTC took than really analyzing consumer harms using a broader framework than the Borkian "only price matters" one. As a result, I've reluctantly concluded that the cure is worse than the disease.
I don't think the most interesting aspect of AI's effect on science is its ability to write papers. If that's what intrigues you about the intersection of AI & science...you're doing it wrong.
I hope someone uses it to write papers describing how to use AI for drug discovery, plant breeding, battery chemistries, new materials and better AI, and then do that work. That would be very interesting.
Open AI has Deep Research which can produce scientific papers by researching a specified topic on the internet, and providing reports with references. Several scientists have claimed that it is already helping their research projects.
Google has AI project GNoME (Graph Networks for Materials Exploration) which has predicted over 2 million previously unknown crystal structures and AlphaFold which has documented the structure of thousands of proteins, and AI is being used for chemical synthesis planning and screening compounds for drug discovery.
“ What I think is happening here is that Lina Khan and many other progressives decided in the late 2010s that big U.S. tech companies have gotten too big for their britches, and need to be taken down a peg. This fixed belief has come to dominate their thinking about any issue involving technology. All they have is a hammer, so everything looks like a nail.”
Didn’t they try to stop Meta from buying a VR company and tried to stop Microsoft from buying Activision? Those both seemed like total nonentity lawsuits - did they honestly believe Meta and Microsoft were going to dominate markets based on those purchases? How? Seems like nuisance lawsuits to me.
She also sued Amazon for automatically enrolling customers in Prime when they did certain things and said unsubscribing was too difficult because it took 5 button clicks to unsubscribe (it takes more clicks to leave a comment on her FTC web site) and also they made their own Amazon Basics products to compete on price (as all big grocery stores do). Strictly nuisance and no customer benefit.
I noticed you said "no _customer_ benefit" at the end: wasn't the massive increase in corporate power from Reagan onwards a direct result of Robert Bork's doctrine that the purpose of antitrust law is solely to protect the consumer from price-gouging, while suppliers and employees are fair game to be exploited with monopsony power?
There is one through-line in Lina Khan/neo-Brandeisian thought that explains everything: anti-bigness. Tim Wu's book is called "The Curse of Bigness." They have this incoherent, aesthetic view about what markets should look like, and that look is "fragmented." Although they don't deny the existence of economies of scale in theory, in practice, they reject any notion that an increase in scale can lead to lower prices and increased output. No process can be considered "competitive" if a big firm somehow benefits.
The key to understanding this is the two 11th hour FTC cases enforcing the Robinson-Patman Act--the "anti-chain store" law from 1936 that the Government stopped enforcing decades ago because it is stupid and makes consumers worse off rather than better off. The conceit behind the law is that suppliers of goods give large retailers discounts that are unavailable to mom-and-pop retailers. So, the government sues the suppliers on the ground that the discounts to large retailers are "discriminatory." In the idiotic fantasy land in which this law is a good idea, a court order saying the discriminatory discounts are "illegal" will mean that the supplier will offer the discounts to everybody, to Walmart and mom-and-pop alike. In the real world, when the discriminatory discounts are declared illegal, the supplier stops offering them at all. In other words, the lawsuit prevents Walmart's customers from enjoying lower prices, all to insulate mom-and-pop from competition from Walmart. Prices go up to Walmart's customers but that's ok because Walmart can no longer undercut mom-and-pop by as much! Great job! Lina Khan knows this and thinks it's a good idea because mom-and-pop is good because small is good and Walmart is bad because big is bad. It doesn't matter that retail is a competitive business--margins in retail are low af--we need fragmented industries because. . . something something something.
The same principal applies to the neo-Brandeisian nonsense about AI. It doesn't matter whether there's a competitive process among firms trying to develop LLMs or other AI models. Khan's point is that the government MUST STOP any firm that's currently big (Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft) from being successful in AI. In her simplistic worldview, big firms wear black hats, full stop. It's as incoherent as it is pathetic.
These people are bad, stupid people. It's good that they're gone.
Even if you credit their believe that consumer welfare should be more broadly defined to include the anticompetitive impact of things like vertical integration, Khan et. al are still idiots because they undermined this argument by brining risible cases that boiled down to "any big company that acquires another should be stopped because they're already big."
They really do not like you in the BTR podcast youtube comments. A theme in commenters seems to be in inability to handle a concept that is counterintuitive, or not true in some primary and basic way. They are epistemologically zealots of common-sense.
Even seemingly mundane things. For example, does building more roads reduce congestion? No it doesn't. If you're a transportation nerd this is super obvious but it is also really weird. If you're not a nerd but also sit in traffic for X hours per day, this is super frustrating.
Building more roads doesn’t reduce congestion, but it does allow more commuters to get to and from work, so expands the radius of housing availability. Transportation nerds don’t want to understand that either, because their “common sense” usually means “let’s take highway spending and use it on mass trans instead”.
Yes this is the correct way to advertise the purpose of new roads. It adds capacity. But everyone (both existing and new car commuters) will almost certainly eventually be slower than before.
However almost every project is advertised in terms of time savings. Which makes intuitive sense but it is wrong.
The cars vs. mass transit question is basically a question of which one is easier to scale up. It is not that one is inherently better than the other but they both do have weak and strong points. Mass transit in particular, as the name implies, is really good at moving a lot of people. That tends to come in handy in large cities.
And mass transit helps the environment far more than a crude mode-share analysis would suggest, because it replaces the longest and most damaging car commutes.
The mechanism by which it happens is that the density of people commuting by car is limited by traffic congestion, so if people closer to downtown switch to mass transit, this reduces congestion to the point that their neighborhoods can increase density at the expense of those at the very edge of the city.
"The “reasoning” models seem to be more accurate than traditional LLMs"
It is always so, so weird to me when I see something that is less than ten years old described as "traditional". Tradition means something handed down across the generations. All too often, people use "traditional" to mean "older" or even "obsolete".
I mentioned this to you on twitter, but the interview you did with Fareed Zakaria was a gem, you should post it here for everyone to see. It mainly focused on the LA fires, but it wasn't so much the content as the fact that it was one of the few times on tv that someone talked politics in an objective manner, it was actually a study in how to do that and I wish everyone could see it. You were measured, precise, objective. We just don't see that much any more.
Good morning, and thank you for your posts: I do appreciate the quality of the content and the clarity of the style. However, I have a minor request to submit: will you kindly try and explain the acronyms you use? Abbreviations like DDoS or DOGE are not immediately understandable, especially for someone living outside the US (I live in Milan, Italy). Thank you for your kind attention
I am with you on the government data section, however, I have a question about inequality. It would seem measuring the distribution of wages in America wouldn’t tell you much about inequality given the wealthy don’t collect wages - they collect capital gains. If we included capital gains in our inequality analysis, what would that look like?
The point is that measuring inequality through wages is insufficient since the top “earners” in society make most of their money through capital gains. Measuring wealth is also misleading because it lumps illiquid assets that don’t produce cash flow (your house) with cash flow producing businesses. Maybe a distribution of purchasing power would be more instructive?
The linked post describes both wage inequality and wealth inequality. Adding in capital gains just measures income inequality, but then you have to account for other income also (rent, royalties, dividends, etc). It’s hard to calculate, and there’s not much to say about inequality, which exists everywhere and at all times. I guess if you measure it in North Korea or Venezuela or PRC you also need to include political inequality to account for how many favors you can get by getting closer to the party.
Should Dems televise ads and otherwise hit the media circuit listing some key bad stuff Trumplon is doing that simply ask “Is this what you voted for?”
Or should they just let them flip over the front of their skis all on their own?
They should maybe just run some issue ads saying what they would have been doing right now if Harris had been elected, and leave the discussion of the current chaos to the news.
That will succeed in bringing their approval rating even lower than the 30% it has now. Harris ran a bad campaign and is a bad politician, whom we won’t be seeing much of again.
In #1, you have a literal graph of an overwhelming majority of US adults believing that Elon Musk, a Big Tech billionaire, has too much influence over the US government.
Then in #5, you write "the real threat was that companies like Facebook and Google would usurp democracy itself" as if this is somehow crying wolf...
We literally have a tech billionaire getting access and control (according to his own tweets) of vast swathes of the US government.
How do you reconcile the "these silly antitrust people were wrong to worry about the political power of big tech" in point #5, with the the "the US government is going through a massive chaos blitz, much of it based on the design and guidance of a big tech billionaire based on the practices of his big tech company"?
The specific point about AI regulation vis a vis China is fine and it is convincing, but Lina Khan being wrong about the competitive advantages or disadvantages in one piece of the tech ecosystem, doesn't make the larger worry about the political power of big tech wrong.
1. Tesla isn't a tech monopolies of the kind Lina Khan target. SpaceX maybe, but you're going to have hard time arguing that they've been bad for space technology, or the US broadly. Twitter, maybe, once was, but if anything Elon vastly reduced their monopolistic network effect.
2. Elon isn't powerful because he's a tech multi-billionaire, he's a powerful because, a. he's a multi-billionaire, b. he has by far the most impressive resume of building massively successful organizations of any American in the last 20 years, and c. He's aligned himself with Trump by being the same type of asshole Trump is. These are all separate from the question of how to regulate big tech companies broadly.
I don't see how, say, breaking up Google or Meta would prevent the risk of Sergei Brinn or Mark Zuckerberg from pulling an Elon.
See, this is an example of the kind of context/reconciliation that I would have liked to see in Noah's article.
If Noah believes that Elon's companies aren't really the type of Big Tech that Khan was talking about, he should say so and say why he thinks that.
If he has a rationale for thinking that Elon's ascent to the commanding heights of the US government isn't an example of "Monopolistic Tech Corporate Power ----> Political Power," then that should be clearly said.
As it is, the reader is left with "These tech anti trust people were crying wolf (about tech company billionaires seizing political power). In totally unrelated news, a four legged pack animal with sharp teeth is now tearing apart our sheep." There are arguments to be made on why these are unrelated, but none of those arguments are made.
Musk’s situation has much more to do with his celebrity and the moral depravity of Donald Trump, than the ability of tech companies to usurp democracy. If Tom Brady had come to Trump with the DOGE plan, Trump would have let him do it.
Under Noah's 'Too many Americans still fear the future' post this issue also came up in the comments. While Noah claims that 'Lina Khan misunderstands competition', the real insight here seems to be that Noah Smith misunderstands power. Not surprising, as economists have somehow tried to create a conceptual separation between 'the market' or 'the economy' and the rest of human society (including politics). As if markets do not arise from, and are not intertwined with the rest of society and its political-institutional systems (and ecological environment, for that matter).
Musk is the first obvious example, as you pointed out. But from a political perspective the 'competition' between US big tech is practically irrelevant anyway, as they all work according to the same politics of 'we can break whatever rules and ethical considerations we want for the sake of profits and you can't do anything to stop me', and together control a sizeable number of (related) markets. The more rules Trump & Musk dump, the more big tech lawyers get to dictate through contracts and the kind of 'tick this box to confirm your acceptance of a 1000 page user agreement which describes in incomprehensible manner how you hand over your soul to us' styled power grabs.
Also, pointing out OpenAI as competition is kind of ignoring the fact that Microsoft rules there, but whatever. We could also mention players like Blackrock and Vanguard, but at this moment I'm too lazy to argue why that's relevant.
But, to just throw out some numbers: Apple and Google control maybe 99% of the smartphone OS 'market'? Microsoft and Apple a slightly lower percentage of computer OS 'market'. In the Netherlands 66% of all government organizations (and other semi-public institutions) use e-mail and cloudservices from Microsoft, another 10% use Google. Numbers might be slightly different in other countries, I don't really know, but there's probably significant dependence on these players everywhere.
The big five of US big tech are at the moment investing hundreds of billions in cloud infrastructure (including lots of localized corruption, appropriation of water and energy resources, etc. etc.).
The somewhat pessimistic, but also not unlikely scenario is that these companies are slowly moving their software, which everyone uses, towards the clouds they own. Then they'll continue pushing on hardware providers (which depend on the OS they provide) to adapt hardware specs so that reliance on cloud systems becomes even bigger, as local compute becomes smaller. And then try and move away from their closed ecosystems.... (while competitors are continuously being bought by the cloud giants...).
Microsoft doesn’t control OpenAI - they’re barely hanging on to them.
I don’t think you understand power. Smartphones mostly depend on Apple or Google operating systems, but how does that give them power over what a user does with a phone? Apple is privacy focused and uses end to end encryption, meaning they can’t even see your data, although the UK government is trying to force them to put in a backdoor that would allow them, or other governments, like the PRC to spy on all their users data. I would rather Apple had the power to protect its customers data from government surveillance , than if the government had similar control of the data. Even if Apple could see the data, the worst they could do is use it for marketing, the governments like the PRC can use it to lock you or your friends up or kill you.
PRC is a great example of my point that you can't see political power separate from market power, considering that their meteoric rise as global superpower was mostly based on them becoming the factory of the world. But sure, they're probably more powerful than US based big tech. That doesn't make big tech any less so... Even though they have, for now, mostly used that power to make money and further cement their positions of power.
Remember the good old days when Microsoft stopped the support for Windows XP and suddenly governments across the world had to scramble to update their shit and pay Microsoft loads of money because police and military forces where running on that stuff... Anyways Mr. Gates himself is now a global power player who has earned this position through market power and his faithful cashcow Microsoft. With the COVID pandemic some Oxford researchers wanted to give the vaccine they developed to the world without patents, which works great with the flu vaccine for which every new strain is shared and every capable facility can start production straight away, but Mr. Gates said 'no' because of his pro market politics. Just one example.
Google and Apple do decide what your phone can do, luckily they're not currently managed by a madman like Musk. Now they mostly focus on what is sold on their stores, and grab 30% of every transaction while they're at it. So in a way they have some sway over how you use your phones. Also on what the future of phones will be; what is best for the customer, or what is best for them? Considering that they pulled up the old psychologist's /casino's playbook of making this stuff more addictive, I'm not sure...
Google search also decides which websites you will visit; not the ones with the best info, but the ones they make most money on. Unfortunate, because their engine used to be quite nice, back in the days.
Apple also once was a customer centered organization who made lots of money from making cool and innovative stuff, unfortunately those days also seem to be over. Which brings us back to the PRC, considering that Apple basically gave away control over the production of their phones.
For now these companies just use their power to make money, fine. But as I said, 75% of Dutch government organizations uses Microsoft and Google for cloud services, which ultimately gives them the power to cut off these institutions of the access to their data. So yes, they have power. And loads of it. And it's not getting any less.
I had hoped like the current situation should be a moment for commentators to revisit their past opinions and compare them to ground truth now that we’re here. But I guess that’s not happening.
“Oh well, maybe a cartel of wealthy tech accelerations has seized control of Washington DC and is wildly disrupting it, but at least on the bright side the folks who poo-pooed the idea that this could happen will adjust their priors.” It feels like in 2025 nobody ever does that: we can just assert that the thing visibly happening isn’t happening, or hint that if it is happening then it’s actually the fault of the people who were warning about it.
As far as AI goes, let’s be realistic. US AI firms have absolutely been hinting around the idea that they might like protections for a while, long before DeepSeek. Those include protections from open source models. Hints of this appear in the Biden AI policy, such as registration of large models, though fortunately we didn’t get most of it into law/action. It’s also worth understanding that real players in this industry are not just OpenAI and Anthropic, but business partners like Microsoft that intend to monetize their output.
All big corporations like to use the government to shield them from competitors and maybe have it go after them as well. That doesn’t mean the government should help them. Biden and Khan were supporting the AI incumbents with their AI safety regulation order, which Trump overturned on his first day. Financial incentives led Newsome to refuse to sign similar AI regulations in California.
There are many companies developing AI models and applications, including many startups. Big AI models are being made by OpenAI, Anthropic, Alphabet, Meta, XAi, and Microsoft (separate from OpenAI). Apple has Apple Intelligence which uses various models. Tesla and Waymo have driving focused AI models. Many smaller companies make special models for video, music, robotics and more.
DeepSeek, Baidu, Alibaba, Moonshot AI are competing from PRC and Mistral from France. No matter what safety regulations or antitrust rules are put in place by the US, I don’t expect China or Europe to abide by them
I think it's funny that you think the Trump administration is going to distort the AI market less than Biden. Clearly it will choose favored companies and then use Federal funds and power to promote and protect them. It's just that the form of that favor won't be spelled out in an EO that has various semi-transparent goals, it'll be based on payoffs and graft.
You're conflating two arguments.
1) Large companies amass immense political capability. Governments should protect against ones that use this power in societally harmful ways.
2) Large companies are per se bad because they have political power. Fight all large companies.
Noah is addressing #2. Khan's original argument sounded like #1: here are ways other than consumer welfare/pricing to assess harms in the context of antitrust. But in practice she and her ilk have behaved according to #2. To do so, they've made ridiculous arguments that were thrown out by the courts. For four years they succeeded by putting a chill over tech M&A, but will probably have a long-term counterproductive impact by undermining support for #1.
From your standpoint, who should have political power in American (or another) society?
For example, we are pretty united in thinking that "Hereditary monarchs" shouldn't have political power.
We are also pretty united in thinking that "every non felon American citizen over 18" should have political power.
Thanks for following up with a question, which is the best way to engage in the comments!
Do you think companies should not have political power? If not, how much?
Your question feels binary. it’s obviously to me a question of degree. I personally think large corporations have too much power and disadvantaged citizens not enough, so I generally support efforts to rebalance power. My assumption is that accomplishing this would lead to policies I often disagree with, but it’s the right thing to do. I also think that innovation and industry are important engines of well being for society. I don’t mean the cliched “trickle down” view of the right, but a more measured view.
So given this, how would I rebalance power?
1. smarter pro-competitive regulation. In particular, reforms to the power of distributors (widely defined) like mandated pricing transparency and limitations on requiring the sale of their own goods.
2. Intellectual property reform to both reduce protection for the minimal innovations that have created the technology patent trolls industry while also increasing protections for consumer goods. Most of the complaints against Amazon from small businesses are about frustration that somebody copied their product, which had not intellectual property protection. If we want innovation in consumer goods, including innovation in the US, we should reward innovators. But only to a degree. Taken too far it becomes anti-competitive.
3. We need some sort of law for IT platform technologies that mandates reasonable openness. The definition of platform should be narrow. The iPhone is a platform, google search is not. For example, something mandating that capabilities on a platform technology have a 3-year exclusivity period after which the platform owner must make them available to others under the same terms as the company itself (e.g. apple can’t just copy the concept of tracking tiles in AirPods and then never let other companies access the best parts).
4. Law increasing the criminal penalties on companies and executives. There’s a book about this called the “Chickenshit Club” that argued that corporate crime is enabled by prosecutors not going after firms. But the book contradicted itself by making it clear that the laws aren’t strong enough and were vulnerable to courts limiting them. The average small-time criminal doesn’t change behavior significantly based on the threat of prison, but large company executives do.
5. Increase taxes with more progressive rates, closer to what existed under Clinton. Fund a much more expansive, “no fault,” unemployment insurance system similar to that in Denmark. The biggest reason companies have power over employees is that people can’t afford to be out of work. This has the perverse effect of degrading industrial efficiency because people stay in jobs they are bad at, not motivated to work hard in, etc..
“ How do you reconcile the "these silly antitrust people were wrong to worry about the political power of big tech" in point #5, with the the "the US government is going through a massive chaos blitz, much of it based on the design and guidance of a big tech billionaire based on the practices of his big tech company"?”
I’m unclear as to why all these people think Elon Musk is not qualified to look at government efficiency. The Warrenites and blue state Democrats don’t seem to take governmental bloat and peri-governmental efficiency seriously despite plenty of pundits howling about it.
OK, so you can see a problem.
You can even rightly see that the existing system is underselling the problem or not doing enough to solve it.
That doesn't mean that the first person to offer a solution has the correct or even an OK solution.
Someone is actually doing something about the problem now, whereas for many years politicians talked about cutting waste and fraud, and voters wanted less spending on foreign aid, but nothing was done other than speeches and commissions, at least since Ronald Reagan, and even he didn’t do much about it. It takes someone like Musk who has credibility running productive lean organizations successfully, and the ability to convince Trump to support him to get any real action done on cutting waste and unnecessary spending.
Seeing the problem is not as easy as shooting fish in a barrel, it is as easy as being somewhere near a barrel. He fumbled this one big time.
Not seeing Big Techs as problem, while Elon is in the White House and Twitter/Meta have a lot of racist things in their feeds, is ridiculous. It’s kind of a confession of the error your argument that they take government because they were “alienated” and, therefore, they are not a problem. Given that you once encouraged Elon to buy Twitter, and that we now see that such transaction turned out horribly, I think you need some reflection about the subject.
To be more accurate the problem with X and Meta is not so much that racist content is _present_ (that's just freedom of speech) but rather that the owners of those platforms are preferentially pushing it into people's feeds -- either because they are racists themselves, or because they believe that it makes them more money as "enragement drives engagement".
I think it is even worse. Elon and Zuck pushed neofascist content in order to get the political favor of Trump. All so they could not face any regulation in their way of their messianic mission.
Where is your evidence that the owners of these platforms are preferentially pushing this content to users. And even if they are how is that not just an exercise of their freedom of speech?
Hmm, I don’t see racist content in my X feed, unless it is referred to by a post from someone refuting it. Maybe what is in your feed depends on which users you follow and what you respond to.
In my For You feed right now, the posts from people I don’t follow include:
some random guy refuting a post made by Sen Coons, Matty Iglesias posting a defense of Sen Warren, the White House announcing it is Making America Healthy Again, some guy complaining about IRC executive salaries, an ex camp counselor saying people with Down’s syndrome are evil actually (worst one I saw), an ex catholic posting about birth rates, and Pop Crave announcing rumors that Kanye is divorcing his unclothed wife.
Okay, I’ll admit the last post is slightly racist, but just because it mentions Ye, who is one.
Big Tech is bad because a rich guy you don’t like is in the White House and some social media has a few racist posts, so shut it down. When Silvio Berlusconi was running Italy with incompetence and sex parties was that the fault of Big Italian Media?
Fukuyama just posted that Elon is a Berlusconi 2.0. Berlusconi used money to buy media and have political power. Sounds familiar? https://open.substack.com/pub/persuasion1/p/elon-musk-and-the-decline-of-western?r=kkt0z&utm_medium=ios
The consumer confidence drop doesn't shock me. Even the hardcore folks I know that are fully aboard the DOGE and Trump train will make sure to indicate that loyalty in their performative throat clearing, before they talk about their plans to batten down the hatches for economic turmoil. DOGE stans realize they're giving themselves a bloody nose and a few broken teeth to see their enemies lose a couple of limbs.
DOGE cost cutting and better government efficiency isn’t going to harm consumers, it is Trump’s tariffs and crazy tax ideas and deportation of needed workers that will hurt the economy.
If there is fraud that is being found and eliminated the only consumers that will be hurt are fraudsters.
What kind of gaslighting is this crap that the people responsible for tech barons wreaking havoc on american democracy are not the tech barons themselves but the people who tried to limit their power?
What's next?
"Honey, I really don't like beating you up, but you give me no other choice, with your trying to go to the police and all."
Between this and Noah denying on a podcast that Elon Musk did the nazi salute I'm beginning to realize that he'll bend over backwards to defend techies no matter what. Not that they'd move a finger to defend him should he need it.
You keep getting the policy ideas behind antitrust reform wrong and at this point I have to assume it’s intentional.
Good lord Noah. The idea that Lina Khan and those that agree with her aren’t concerned about economic impacts of consolidation, especially in big tech, is specious and absurd. Of course we are. We just think antitrust analysis should be returned to its pre-Bork era and freed of the myopic obsession with “consumer prices.”
Excessive consolidation in the tech sector affects far more than “the price of software” as you so memorably put it. It affects wages in the industry, the ability of new entrants to get funding, become competitive, and develop new products, and the ability of the giants to cause unwanted externalities with their behavior to name just a few.
Stopping big tech companies from buying smaller ones will hurt smaller companies whose only path to success would be IPOs or SPACs. And workers in small tech startups (low resources , high effort, low pay, high risk, high reward ) are not the same ones who work in big tech (stability, many resources, high pay).
How would breaking up Alphabet provide better products or wages, they would have to shutdown all their advanced programs, like quantum computing, WayMo and deep mind if they no longer had advertising income from search. Are there startup companies working on quantum computing that would benefit from a breakup?
Stopping anticompetitive mergers wouldn't do anything to affect the IPO market. If anything, exits via IPOs would be more common than they are today if exits via acquisition were less available. That goes for SPACs too, though the use of SPACs has pretty much disappeared for reasons entirely unrelated to competition policy (SEC regulations).
How do you think Google/Alphabet got to be where it is today? One big factor was the antitrust case against Microsoft and the forced unbundling of Internet Explorer that allowed the rise in other browsers like Chrome. Meta exists at the size it is today because when the company was started and had its initial growth, there weren't other social media giants just waiting to snap it up and take over or shut down the product.
Better wages would be achieved by having more companies competing for labor. With more markets open to competition, more startups would be viable and able to get VC funding. That means more places for engineers to be hired. More companies coming into existence and getting funding means more discoveries and advancements.
Silicon Valley is where it is today in large part because of effective antitrust regulation in the middle of the 20th century, as well as California's longstanding policy against non-compete contracts (which is also a competition regulation!). Allowing Big Tech to continue on with its current level of market dominance merely strangles the next evolution of the U.S. tech sector in its crib.
I actually agree that there are anticompetitive impacts from consolidation, particularly in areas related to distribution.
The problem is that "big is bad" was much better at explaining the actions Khan's FTC took than really analyzing consumer harms using a broader framework than the Borkian "only price matters" one. As a result, I've reluctantly concluded that the cure is worse than the disease.
I don't think the most interesting aspect of AI's effect on science is its ability to write papers. If that's what intrigues you about the intersection of AI & science...you're doing it wrong.
I hope someone uses it to write papers describing how to use AI for drug discovery, plant breeding, battery chemistries, new materials and better AI, and then do that work. That would be very interesting.
It can and will do those things.
Open AI has Deep Research which can produce scientific papers by researching a specified topic on the internet, and providing reports with references. Several scientists have claimed that it is already helping their research projects.
Google has AI project GNoME (Graph Networks for Materials Exploration) which has predicted over 2 million previously unknown crystal structures and AlphaFold which has documented the structure of thousands of proteins, and AI is being used for chemical synthesis planning and screening compounds for drug discovery.
“ What I think is happening here is that Lina Khan and many other progressives decided in the late 2010s that big U.S. tech companies have gotten too big for their britches, and need to be taken down a peg. This fixed belief has come to dominate their thinking about any issue involving technology. All they have is a hammer, so everything looks like a nail.”
Didn’t they try to stop Meta from buying a VR company and tried to stop Microsoft from buying Activision? Those both seemed like total nonentity lawsuits - did they honestly believe Meta and Microsoft were going to dominate markets based on those purchases? How? Seems like nuisance lawsuits to me.
She also sued Amazon for automatically enrolling customers in Prime when they did certain things and said unsubscribing was too difficult because it took 5 button clicks to unsubscribe (it takes more clicks to leave a comment on her FTC web site) and also they made their own Amazon Basics products to compete on price (as all big grocery stores do). Strictly nuisance and no customer benefit.
I noticed you said "no _customer_ benefit" at the end: wasn't the massive increase in corporate power from Reagan onwards a direct result of Robert Bork's doctrine that the purpose of antitrust law is solely to protect the consumer from price-gouging, while suppliers and employees are fair game to be exploited with monopsony power?
There is one through-line in Lina Khan/neo-Brandeisian thought that explains everything: anti-bigness. Tim Wu's book is called "The Curse of Bigness." They have this incoherent, aesthetic view about what markets should look like, and that look is "fragmented." Although they don't deny the existence of economies of scale in theory, in practice, they reject any notion that an increase in scale can lead to lower prices and increased output. No process can be considered "competitive" if a big firm somehow benefits.
The key to understanding this is the two 11th hour FTC cases enforcing the Robinson-Patman Act--the "anti-chain store" law from 1936 that the Government stopped enforcing decades ago because it is stupid and makes consumers worse off rather than better off. The conceit behind the law is that suppliers of goods give large retailers discounts that are unavailable to mom-and-pop retailers. So, the government sues the suppliers on the ground that the discounts to large retailers are "discriminatory." In the idiotic fantasy land in which this law is a good idea, a court order saying the discriminatory discounts are "illegal" will mean that the supplier will offer the discounts to everybody, to Walmart and mom-and-pop alike. In the real world, when the discriminatory discounts are declared illegal, the supplier stops offering them at all. In other words, the lawsuit prevents Walmart's customers from enjoying lower prices, all to insulate mom-and-pop from competition from Walmart. Prices go up to Walmart's customers but that's ok because Walmart can no longer undercut mom-and-pop by as much! Great job! Lina Khan knows this and thinks it's a good idea because mom-and-pop is good because small is good and Walmart is bad because big is bad. It doesn't matter that retail is a competitive business--margins in retail are low af--we need fragmented industries because. . . something something something.
The same principal applies to the neo-Brandeisian nonsense about AI. It doesn't matter whether there's a competitive process among firms trying to develop LLMs or other AI models. Khan's point is that the government MUST STOP any firm that's currently big (Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft) from being successful in AI. In her simplistic worldview, big firms wear black hats, full stop. It's as incoherent as it is pathetic.
These people are bad, stupid people. It's good that they're gone.
Even if you credit their believe that consumer welfare should be more broadly defined to include the anticompetitive impact of things like vertical integration, Khan et. al are still idiots because they undermined this argument by brining risible cases that boiled down to "any big company that acquires another should be stopped because they're already big."
They really do not like you in the BTR podcast youtube comments. A theme in commenters seems to be in inability to handle a concept that is counterintuitive, or not true in some primary and basic way. They are epistemologically zealots of common-sense.
The debasement of common sense is kinda scary.
Even seemingly mundane things. For example, does building more roads reduce congestion? No it doesn't. If you're a transportation nerd this is super obvious but it is also really weird. If you're not a nerd but also sit in traffic for X hours per day, this is super frustrating.
Building more roads doesn’t reduce congestion, but it does allow more commuters to get to and from work, so expands the radius of housing availability. Transportation nerds don’t want to understand that either, because their “common sense” usually means “let’s take highway spending and use it on mass trans instead”.
Yes this is the correct way to advertise the purpose of new roads. It adds capacity. But everyone (both existing and new car commuters) will almost certainly eventually be slower than before.
However almost every project is advertised in terms of time savings. Which makes intuitive sense but it is wrong.
The cars vs. mass transit question is basically a question of which one is easier to scale up. It is not that one is inherently better than the other but they both do have weak and strong points. Mass transit in particular, as the name implies, is really good at moving a lot of people. That tends to come in handy in large cities.
Taking cars off the road by making mass transit better (causing more people to use it improves things for everyone.)
You can certainly do mass transit poorly, but that's not a given.
Such communist hellholes like Switzerland, Taiwan, and Singapore have amazing public transport that is clean, frequent, safe, and rich people use.
They certainly still have roads, cars, and highways.
And mass transit helps the environment far more than a crude mode-share analysis would suggest, because it replaces the longest and most damaging car commutes.
The mechanism by which it happens is that the density of people commuting by car is limited by traffic congestion, so if people closer to downtown switch to mass transit, this reduces congestion to the point that their neighborhoods can increase density at the expense of those at the very edge of the city.
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/01/15/public-transit-is-greener-than-it-seems/
"The “reasoning” models seem to be more accurate than traditional LLMs"
It is always so, so weird to me when I see something that is less than ten years old described as "traditional". Tradition means something handed down across the generations. All too often, people use "traditional" to mean "older" or even "obsolete".
I mentioned this to you on twitter, but the interview you did with Fareed Zakaria was a gem, you should post it here for everyone to see. It mainly focused on the LA fires, but it wasn't so much the content as the fact that it was one of the few times on tv that someone talked politics in an objective manner, it was actually a study in how to do that and I wish everyone could see it. You were measured, precise, objective. We just don't see that much any more.
If he can ignore court orders, then everyone can ignore him.
Good morning, and thank you for your posts: I do appreciate the quality of the content and the clarity of the style. However, I have a minor request to submit: will you kindly try and explain the acronyms you use? Abbreviations like DDoS or DOGE are not immediately understandable, especially for someone living outside the US (I live in Milan, Italy). Thank you for your kind attention
DDOS - distributed denial of service where multiple computers flood a single web site to deny others access.
DOGE - department of government efficiency, not ancient magistrates of Venice, but maybe also a Shiba Inu meme.
I am with you on the government data section, however, I have a question about inequality. It would seem measuring the distribution of wages in America wouldn’t tell you much about inequality given the wealthy don’t collect wages - they collect capital gains. If we included capital gains in our inequality analysis, what would that look like?
The point is that measuring inequality through wages is insufficient since the top “earners” in society make most of their money through capital gains. Measuring wealth is also misleading because it lumps illiquid assets that don’t produce cash flow (your house) with cash flow producing businesses. Maybe a distribution of purchasing power would be more instructive?
The linked post describes both wage inequality and wealth inequality. Adding in capital gains just measures income inequality, but then you have to account for other income also (rent, royalties, dividends, etc). It’s hard to calculate, and there’s not much to say about inequality, which exists everywhere and at all times. I guess if you measure it in North Korea or Venezuela or PRC you also need to include political inequality to account for how many favors you can get by getting closer to the party.
Should Dems televise ads and otherwise hit the media circuit listing some key bad stuff Trumplon is doing that simply ask “Is this what you voted for?”
Or should they just let them flip over the front of their skis all on their own?
They should maybe just run some issue ads saying what they would have been doing right now if Harris had been elected, and leave the discussion of the current chaos to the news.
That will succeed in bringing their approval rating even lower than the 30% it has now. Harris ran a bad campaign and is a bad politician, whom we won’t be seeing much of again.
who is going to pay unemployment to the redundant government workers?'
How much does the art of the deal cost?