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One of capitalisms biggest tragedies
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this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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That's a very broad reading of Capitalism as a system of incentives. But when you break it down, you find that it isn't holistically profit-maximizing. It is locally rent-seeking. Which is to say, if we all work for a freeway that moves $10M/day in commerce and I - personally - have the opportunity to erect a toll gate that earns me $100k/day but inhibits $1M/day in commerce as a result, I will build that toll gate.
We saw this problem play out with the collapse of the Sears Roebuck Company under CEO Edward Lampert. Lampert took the capitalist ideology to its logical conclusion and began pitting individual departments within the greater corporate behemoth against one another. Consequentially, he dissolved all the economies of scale Sears had aggregated. Far from enhancing the bottom line, his business strategy dissolved all the economies of integration and scale that the firm had built up over its 120 year history.
Wherever the tenants of rent-seeking are applied, individuals with power will attempt to extract surplus wealth from weaker agents beneath them, even when that would destabilize the system as a whole. This can be disastrous for the "bottom line". We used to even classify it as such, labeling these behaviors as "price gouging" and "embezzlement". Now we see these initiatives as "creative destruction" and applaud their implementation.
Wow I've never thought of it that way. That makes so much sense. This kind of implies all subscription based services will inevitably devolve into paying more for less in a race to the bottom until the whole thing collapses. Which is interesting because I remember hearing about an economics paper that showed that the most profitable business model is bundled subscriptions. It's kind of amazing someone can say that with a straight face looking at what has happened to cable TV.
lol.
lmao.
Its definitely a term that's been co-opted by MBAs, but the process of enclosure is centuries old and foundational to the process of capitalist profit-taking.
I'm not a huge fan of negative externalities in business. And profiteering generates enormous externalities.
Oh no, buddy. I've got some terrible news for you. Cellular mobile telephones are a soviet technology. And the entire backbone of the modern domestic telecommunications service was created with public lands, materials, and labor.
The modern cell carriers are simply gatekeepers, charging exorbitant fees to access public works. When the western states copied the USSR's homework back in the 70s and 80s, no single private business could afford to front the enormous costs associated with the infrastructure. So the Federal Government issued block grants and unleashed (literal) armies of engineers, surveyors, and construction teams to lay the original main arteries. They then tasked a handful of private companies to operate as retail brokers for consumer access and use.
The bulk of international digital infrastructure is public works. Always has been. And the cost of accessing these public works varies enormously by state, entirely due to who is tasked with gatekeeping access to the service. US telecomm costs are astronomical, compared to Mexico or Germany or India or South Africa, entirely because the American domestic retailers charge a higher toll.
Incidentally, that's also why we have some of the slowest and least reliable networks in the post-industrial world. Once we gave up investing in public broadband, public wifi, and public satellite services, the gatekeeping private telecom firms failed to maintain pace with peer nations like Japan and Germany and China and India. Now you can buy a cell phone off the street in New Delhi with a plan that charges pennies and get higher speeds and better coverage than anything T-mobile or AT&T can provide stateside for $100/mo.
You're citing the first retail model sold in a western market, built on technology from 20 years prior.
We've understood electric diodes since 1874.
Bell labs secured the first US patent for a silicon point-contact transistor in 1948 two years after Soviet scientists proved out bipolar diffusion in silicon. Two ahem German scientists, Herbert Mataré and Heinrich Welker, developed crystal rectifiers from silicon and germanium during WW2. They extended their discovery into a modern working transistor in 1947, at the Compagnie des Freins et Signaux, a Westinghouse subsidiary in Paris. Tadashi Sasaki pioneered the first Japanese transistor at Kobe Kogyo that same year.
American history loves to casually ignore the global race towards modern machinery, assuming anything that wasn't filed at the US Patent Office simply didn't exist.
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