I feel that America is in the midst of a new gilded age; instead of Standard Oil, we have Amazon.
Like the late 1920s, we saw losses in purchasing power of the average American, the collection of wealth among the top 1%, and disruption of our civic spaces as a result. I think the thing that many Americans aren't aware of was just how violent that time in US history was[1].
The US economy isn't just about how comfortable the average US citizen is, it is also a measure of how much cushion there is in our society between us being frustrated looking at a job board and being angry and armed in the streets. The teachers strikes in Oklahoma, Florida, and W. Virginia are showing the rise of Unions (much like in the gilded age as well). Protest and civic engagement must be our response, we should take signs like the wealth of Bezos as a cautionary tale, rather than something to simply marvel at.
Except we actually had a functioning federal government during the last gilded age, so we ended up with things like the Sherman Antitrust Act, and eventually the New Deal.
I doubt we'll be so lucky this time around. Things are about to get absolutely brutal for the 90%.
"About to?" It already is brutal for the bottom half. And the 90th percentile is too low: people in that range are paupers by comparison even to the top 5. I think the 95th to the 99th percentile is the region to look at. There are some seriously deluded individuals in that group who think they won't be on the outside with the rest of us when the top pull the gates closed behind them.
America is a nation of temporarily inconvenienced millionaires. This disconnect between expectations and reality is one of it's biggest problems. You can visit any number of poorer nations where being poor does is not a punishment, it not equate to a difficult or miserable life, because society, it's services and it's infrastructure are all built to accomodate people of modest means. In America is designed for you to have a McMansion with a two car garage, and if you can't meet the bottom line you either go into debt to pretend you're meeting it or you're cast to the fringes where you struggle just to survive in a world that is not designed to accomodate People of modest means.
The (disputed) John Steinbeck quote you might be referring to: "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires"
Today we have a military industrial complex supported by both parties and our most vital student loans (championed by our "left" party) come with no bankruptcy protection.
We do have a very strong Federal government, but it's designed to funnel money to various interest groups.
By making compute infrastructure affordable and by making consumer review data available for all products, Bezos is a champion of the little guy. He hasn't gotten rich through government crony capitalism or fraud, he's done the simplest stuff better than anyone else could. He let's people buy products that are reviewed thoroughly by other customers, he has a reasonable return policy, etc. This benefits consumers AND honest merchants selling through the platform.
AWS has made it way cheaper to start and scale many kinds of tech startups, and paved the way for firms like Heroku and DigitalOcean, and the entire vps ecosystem.
Bezos is a master of infrastructure execution. This is extremely rare, as we can see from the fate of Jet and Azure. Year after year the genius of his business tradeoff decisions and strategies become more clear. This is why he's wealthy. What we need are more people with that kind of vision and ability to see the big picture and solve real, unsexy problems.
Before AWS I had dealt with Dell as a part of several startups. The sales people were shady and they tried to milk every penny out of the customer for semi-proprietary hardware that was expensive to support. People flocked to AWS to escape the kind of predation and mediocrity championed by Dell.
Most readers of HN have the technical ability to have started AWS but (if they were of age at the time) did not see the opportunity and the path to execution. Bezos did. Let's give him some credit. I think he's one of the most remarkable visionaries of our age.
>By making compute infrastructure affordable and by making consumer review data available for all products, Bezos is a champion of the little guy. He hasn't gotten rich through government crony capitalism or fraud, he's done the simplest stuff better than anyone else could. He let's people buy products that are reviewed thoroughly by other customers, he has a reasonable return policy, etc. This benefits consumers AND honest merchants selling through the platform.
He didn't do this, his workers did. How many of his workers are making minimum wage, with no health insurance or health insurance they can't afford deductibles for? How many of his warehouses don't have air conditioning? How many people working for Amazon are forced to pee in bottles, pushed beyond their limits?
He's not sitting there shipping all packages, not sitting there soldering amazon echo's, his workers are.
$150 billion shouldn't exist for Bezos and Bezos alone, as the wealth should be spread around the company to the workers who actually do the work. We likely wouldn't be this situation of extreme inequality if this was the case. It's disgusting selfishness that is allowed by our current system.
Not saying that I disagree with the sentiment of your comment but Bezos does not have $150B. I would be surprised if he had any more than a few million in cash/liquid assets. His worth is tightly coupled to the value of Amazon stock that he owns. A lot of workers do benefit from their stock increase through granted stock options.
All that said. Amazon needs to take a long hard look at how they manage their warehouses and fulfillment centers when it comes to workers rights and common decency.
How many of the workers chose to work there instead of some other, inferior option? How many are proud of what they accomplished? How many went on to found other successful startups like Instacart?
selfishness is allowed? Is it possible to disallow a core human trait?
Yes. Envy is a core human trait as well. Some people envy their neighbor's car. Stealing it is still forbidden by law.
Likewise, disallowing envy (or selfishness) by itself is not possible, but making illegal the actions that result from those feelings can (and sometimes should) be outlawed.
Completely agree. Bezos is great. This is not so much an attack on Bezos as it is an attack on a system that let's 30 single individuals amass more wealth than the bottom 3 billion.
except the mass majority of the bottom three billion live where governments do respect property rights. private wealth only exists where that is true, otherwise all wealth would be concentrated in the hands of politicians as it is in many places; well that and their very select friends most of which they installed over state resources.
"In 2013 we estimate that 3.2 billion individuals – more than two thirds of adults in the world – have wealth below 10 000 dollars."[1] In total they also estimate that those 3.2 billion individuals have a combined wealth of 7.3 trillion dollars.
So, unless you're implying that everyone who has "a checking account" has more than 7.3 trillion dollars, sorry, it's just not the same.
I'm not denying that there is extreme inequality between poor in America and poor in Africa or India.
But let's not make false comparisons between having a banking account and being in the top 30 wealthiest individuals. Having a banking account is not the same as having 7 trillion dollars in wealth.
The New Deal has never not been controversial, from proposal to present day. I imagine its effects will be argued about until the heat death of the universe.
The parent post should not be downvoted. It's perfectly possible that the effect of the New Deal is controversial (or even dubious) amongst historians and that most schools teach it as a resounding success. In that case, it's interesting to hear both what historians think and what people are actually taught.
Nearly all histories of the Great Depression are agenda driven, rather than an honest attempt at fact finding.
Most paint it as a failure of capitalism, the rest as a direct result of government manipulation of the banking system, trade disruption caused by Smoot-Hawley, and huge tax increases.
Virtually all credible historians agree that the New Deal itself was largely ineffective in solving the Great Depression. It started in 1933 with unemployment rate of 25%. Half a decade and many millions of dollars later, unemployment was 19%. [1] The Great Depression ended only when Europe went to war in 1939 and financed the American economy.
Depending on who you ask, the New Deal was either ineffective because it was fundamentally flawed, or ineffective because it wasn't big enough and didn't raise enough debt. [2]
By your own source, a majority (51%) of "economic historians" working in economics departments and a strong majority (74%) of "economic historians" working in history departments disagree outright with the statement: "Taken as a whole, government policies of the New Deal served to lengthen and deepen the Great Depression."
It seems unlikely that some huge portion (say, > 90%) of those historians further believe that New Deal policies had no or little positive effect on the Great Depression. Are the "credible historians" just the ones who happen to agree with you on this topic?
I've never read any modern historian to say that the New Deal effectively fixed the Great Depression.
So yes, I believe that most of those 51% and 74% believe the effect was nonexistant or small. Typically, something like "if FDR had spent as much on the New Deal as he did during the War, it would have ended the Depression". [1] (I.e., it was too little, as in my previous comment.)
I welcome any references to historians claiming the New Deal largely fixed the Great Depression. (Or really, any option from a historian more positive than the quoted article.)
Or...you know, just silently downvote this comment :)
> It started in 1933 with unemployment rate of 25%. Half a decade and many millions of dollars later, unemployment was 19%.
Absolute numbers are important, but the rate of change more so. Were unemployment raising to 25% or already going down? It's the difference between those 19% being a meager improvement and staving off absolute disaster.
While the New Deal may have lengthened the Great Depression (impossible to prove one way or the other), it was a net win by preventing a violent socialist revolution. Those uprisings occurred in other countries. It really could have happened here.
That's assuming a socialist revolution is unequivocally bad. The world would be so incredibly different, it's impossible to say that it would be worse.
A socialist revolution during the Great Depression would have left the USA temporarily too weakened and divided to help the Allies defeat the Axis powers in WWII. That would have been unequivocally bad for the entire world.
You can't just sum up the huge variety of programs that was the New Deal like that. Yes, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) probably did halt the existing recovery but it was a recovery that FDR had started by reversing the hard money policies of his predecessors. And you can certainly argue all day about whether stuff like FDIC was a net improvement if you want to but that didn't really affect the length of the Great Depression.
We actually have a pretty good idea of what worked and what didn't during the Great Depression and mainstream economic historians[1] seem to have reached a rough consensus.
In school, though, we teach the Great Depression through the lens of political history. So for that purpose it doesn't matter what was really causing it, just what people at the time thought was causing it.
Really I'd recommend reading chapter 1 of The Wages of Destruction. The book is really on the economics of WWII but it summarizes the modern consensus on the Great Depression as a starting point and since it fits everything into one chapter ends up being very readable. Mostly it was contagious deflation mediated by the gold standard with gold hording causing deflation causing more hoarding. Countries on the silver standard like China were essentially unaffected. Countries that went off the gold standard early like the UK or Japan recovered early. The Wikipedia article is mostly a history of how economists' understanding of the Great Depression has changed over the decades rather than a description of where it stands now but it works pretty well.
EDIT: A while ago Krugman had a very good piece trying to explain how deflation can cause problems. Different sorts of economists often disagree about whether its interest rates or aggregate quantities or expectation traps or whatever that's the most important aspect of tight or loose money but they all agree that these things are real and meaningful and generally explain depressions. http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/19...
Or the 1%. Something Rich people tend to forget is that the system of law and order we have now prevents armed uprising of the lower classes, which has a history of cropping up during very hard economic times.
Not advocating, and I doubt I'd be one of them holding a pitchfork, but it is something to keep in mind.
Back in the day, most people grew up working on a farm/ranch/etc. and actually knew how to use a pitchfork. I'm trying to imagine today's obese generation trying to physically overthrow the government and can't help thinking that it wouldn't go so well.
Most Americans have guns. The police has better weapons, but it would be a war of attrition, and I doubt most police would want to go on killing sprees against their fellow countrymen.
Although I doubt it'd reach the point of massive insurrection. That would require a total loss of trust in the government, and I think we're still far from that.
How old is the average American gun owner? Are they physically fit?
Merely owning guns is different than possessing the physical ability and training in weapons and tactics to use them effectively, especially versus military or paramilitary forces (National Guard and Border Patrol is a much more likely initial pro-government force than police). Not only are they equipped and trained with the same weapons civilians may have, they also have automatic weapons, nightvision, grenades, armored vehicles, helicopters, tear gas, sonic weapons, fire trucks, and a lot more.
Keep in mind that the very modern, very well funded, and very well equipped US military has been fighting a bunch of dudes with rifles and IED's for the past several dozen years without conclusive victories or signs of the resistance slowing.
That US military is also neither attacking its own citizens it has filial and friendly ties with, nor attacking people who look and talk like it.
Modern armor and missiles don't accomplish much when the enemies main goal is to just live as they want to (instead of conquer territory or resources).
To be fair, the U.S. military is very effective against the individual people they are fighting at any given moment. Kill ratios in recent conflicts are of the order of 100:1. It's just that for every insurgent you kill, you create 10 more. Unless your goal is to just depopulate the rest of the globe (something I wonder about, given recent U.S. foreign policy), you can't actually win this war without addressing the conditions that lead people to hate the U.S. in the first place.
In every instance throughout history, the $weapon wielded by the peasant has been vastly inferior to the one wielded by the noble's army, guards, etc. In fact one could argue that the peasantry has never been less outgunned that they are currently, when previous uprisings made do with sticks and rocks, and the heads of the wealthy still rolled in the end.
The fact is that the select few protect themselves with rolls of the sons and daughters of the masses. Sure, plenty of them will turn their weapons on their fellow countrymen for a paycheck, but how many? And for how long?
And especially once those bullets start flying, how useful is the money being paid to those guards? How long before they have all the money they could ever want and no one will sell them food?
In our hyper-connected world, we lose people jobs when they crack a racist joke on twitter. How hard will it be to find the 1%'s executioners?
It’s hard to be sure exactly what scenario people are picturing when they speculate about this. If you want an example of urban warfare vs. a modern military, check out Iraq about 10 year ago. While it was difficult, for them, guess who won. As far as the rest of the theorizing, we would have to be on common ground about the entire scenario before it’s worth speculating about.
For example, I don’t know what food you’re talking about because in my wild fantasy scenario, all of the freeways have been destroyed and Walmarts and grocery stores are empty. Mass starvation, plague, panic, electricity is off, no communication systems work other than the military. They have seized anything useful. They have tanks etc, which helps a lot. As far as ‘who will sell them food’... you’re talking about a highly armed military force fighting a civil war? Do you think people are going shopping at Kroger with the other side or something? This isn’t the French Revolution. This is 80 years after millions of people died in gas chambers in Europe, right? The next major wars are not going to be very friendly.
People can be extremely resilient, especially when their lives are at hand. I don't think you've thought this through. A true civil war where the US military is fighting its own citizens won't be like the Iraq war at all. There is likely to be mass defection of soldiers who are unwilling to fight their own countrymen. Massive civil disobedience where taxpayers stop paying their taxes, farmers defect to the sides that they most recognize with.
Its not a scenario that I really want to think about since its so brutal. But it can happen, and the war is likely to be a prolonged battle.
Not to mention, the unrest in the Motherland will let other rogue forces run amok internationally as they jostle for supremacy over each other. I can't see any of that ending well.
If the govt or millitary hold so much tech that you end up in a hunger game scenario, and the population is oppressed (but unlike hunger games, the oppression comes in the form of feeble food and entertainment - ala, bread and circus).
The people feel comfortable enough to not want to revolt. Yet, ignores the minority that do get harsher treatment, because doing so puts their own lively hood in jeopardy.
Well I was specifically speaking in very broad terms. I don't know what a Civil War in the modern US will look like and I hope to Christ or whoever else is running this thing that it doesn't come to that.
I think though that far beyond contemplating who is shooting at who with what, the more interesting question is what does victory look like for the 1%? Just shoot everyone who complains until there's nothing but peaceful staff left?
If you're talking an actual war of attrition between the classes in the US, you'd be crazy to bet on the rich. It's not even a question of "if" they can win, their win condition DOES NOT EXIST and cannot exist. The more disgruntled people who are killed, the more people become disgruntled, until you have the entirety of the damn country saying "wait a minute, why am I shooting my fellow citizens because Mr. Bezos wants a 10th house?"
If this gets to a place of violence, and if the Rich of today allow it to get to that place, they have assured their own destruction, it's simply a matter of time. The best thing they could be doing right now is supporting measures to help out the common people, if for no other reason than their money cannot stop the torches.
Edit: I'm rambling a bit here but I guess my counterpoint basically boils down to: let's assume that the Rich get full control of the US Military and it's assets to end civil insurrection and restore economic order. How do they do it? What orders do they give? Where do they send the missiles to dismantle the resistance? Which neighborhoods get power cut? Who gets banned from twitter? And how does it end?
I'm just not seeing a way that such a conflict would end where Amazon (or anyone else) could simply resume business as usual.
I think a modern U.S. Civil War will look a lot like Syria. Once social order collapses, you'll get a bunch of different armed factions all pursuing their own social agenda. Remember that the 99% generally hates each other a lot more than they hate the rich; I can't imagine a Nazi from North Carolina, an Evangelical from Arkansas, a proud Southerner from Alabama, a blue-collar Irish Catholic from Boston, a cattle-rancher from Montana, a Jewish doctor from NYC, a poor urban black from Atlanta, and a Californian tech-worker all fighting on the same side.
Any conflict where the U.S. disintegrates will likely spread worldwide, too, as other nations take advantage of the power vacuum to press their own claims. So emigration is unlikely to be a solution for people who wish to remain neutral.
The endgame for the 1% is likely to become lords or petty kings of little feudal domains. They may offer to provide security services to their employees in exchange for economic service. They wouldn't be global titans of industry, but they'd be heads of their little fiefdoms. The smart ones will avoid major military action, instead only clearing the local area around their corporate offices of populist insurgents. If the insurgents want to fight other insurgent groups, that's their business; they can all kill each other off.
Or defectors from the military. That was the case in both the Syrian Civil War, the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the first American Civil War - the nucleus of armed resistance formed around former military men who couldn't raise arms against their countrymen.
Private security forces and tech/AI are wildcards - we haven't had anything like the former since feudal mercenary days, and we haven't had anything like the latter ever - but could also form the basis for power centers.
> If you want an example of urban warfare vs. a modern military, check out Iraq about 10 year ago. While it was difficult, for them, guess who won.
Sure, Shock and Awe was successful, but it was nothing more than a raid. The US Army did not conquer Iraq, at least on the medium term. They barely control most of the territory.
For the French Revolution, the King refused to used the army against the people. And the revolutionary had the support of some of the rich and powerful
An attempt to overthrow the government is handled by the military, not the police. The military has more guns, better supply lines, and better discipline than police forces.
Minority generally means “less than half”. In some contexts, with a non-binary trait, it may mean “smaller than the largest group”, with the largest group being a “majority” if it is greater than 50%, and a “plurality” if it is not.
33% on a binary trait (one either does or does not own at least one gun) is clearly a minority.
So that’s 33%—of households, not people—at best. Definitely a minority—a minority that appears to be growing even smaller if the trends continue. They’re definitely vocal.
What part of calling them a vocal minority seems inaccurate?
I guess I'm not used to such a large group being seen as a "minority". Isn't the breakdown in US elections roughly 1 in 3 (or 1 in 4) Democrat, Republican and other (independent / didn't vote)?
A house hold often includes more than one person. Those other individuals are not gun owners. Gun owners are a fairly small group with a very powerful lobby that needs to be ignored.
This (and the sibling) strikes me as an odd interpretation - there are more guns than people in the US - most households with any guns, have more than one gun. And as I see it living in a household with guns, generally means access to guns?
So I readily read one in three households, as strictly more than one in three persons - have access to guns?
> So I readily read one in three households, as strictly more than one in three persons
That's a bad reading. Even if everyone in a household with a gun owner have access to guns, that would mean 33% of households implies exactly 33% of people if gun ownership is distributed among households with no bias by household size. It doesn't imply more than 33% of people unless gun owning households are larger than non-gun-owning households.
Why even care about this meaningless distinction? Households can give other households guns. What's important is if there are enough guns and ammunition for every person, not how they are distributed unless it's extremely skewed to a very specific part of the population.
Only if we're talking about gun ownership, which you did not do. You brought up the gun lobby. It's relevant because you equate gun owners only to the gun lobby.
There are many non-gun owners that are without a doubt for owning guns.
On a more serious note, a population is only peacefully policed at the enjoyment of the people. The critical mass of insurrection beyond which a population can no longer be policed is low. In my lifetime I have seen riots in LA, Baltimore, and Ferguson, to name just three. And those were of minority populations. If the entitled "obese" hegemonic population were part of the insurrection, it might be more difficult to put them down.
An overthrow would look entirely different today. The masses wouldn't carry pitchforks, they'd use computers. (I don't know how, but assuming people today wouldn't use computers is definitely wrong)
if I were to overthrow the government, I'm assuming many peers would be involved too, probably Anonymous, a lot of the tech community, etc.. (if it was down party lines, or even 99% vs 1%...
Assuming the revolting army was full of tech geeks, the best we could hope for is a drone/robotic army that uses technology. Because jocks most of us are not. LOL.
I have to assume that the government has the ability to shutdown the Internet at will. Perhaps even the ability to physically destroy the networks at key locations at will. They certainly have the ability to take the electric grid offline at will which would render most technology moot within a short period of time unless you have solar panels and battery backup.
Not at all -- not with satellite tech/internet (who's side will Musk be on?) -- what about mesh networks? Musk could also supply energy/electricity if he joined the 90%, I'm sure some billionaires might come join the lowly poor people fighting against Oligarchy.
This is part of the reason why the country is so divided. It's a great tactic to prevent the masses from organized. Give the left and the right something to hate (each other) and steal the economic gains for yourself.
Sadly this is true.. I'd love to see Progressive politicians jump ship to Republican, pick up a few emotional issues like anti-abortion (though secretly pro-choice), and be pro-gun (though still a believer in regulating which guns are allowed on the market).
Basically troll the party in red states, some might actually get elected on a platform similar to Bernie but tweaked to appeal to right wingers, and then we can work from left/right to pull the masses to a center that's more progressive less corporatist.
Small local police departments are also staffed by the 90%, though.
I find it difficult to imagine an uprising against the 1% in America any time soon, but if it did happen I can absolutely imagine the police siding against the 1%.
At this point in America, pretty much everyone who has weapons and authority to use force is pretty ideologically aligned with the 1%. There is a pretty strong narrative in that group that all of these problems that many would ascribe to poor income equality are actually caused by immigrants, welfare recipients, and government.
I think the chance of the police or military siding against the 1% is incredibly small.
From my experience, police officers generally don't like rich people. Also, I don't think that members of the police force or the military are as obedient or loyal as they used to be in the past.
If the 1% decided to lobby for police salaries > 400k per year, would the police be more obedient? If revolution was coming, you better believe pay for police would rise, and they'd definitely protect their own interests.
Except, if it looked like it was coming to that, guess who just got a major pay raise : Police... Now Police is the highest paid field in America...and they'll do anything the 1% tell them to.
> Except nowadays even small local police departments have tanks and swat teams.
Successful uprisings by the masses against the elites almost always involve substantial fractions of the military, police, and other security services defecting, either abandoning their gear or taking it with them and turning it against the elites.
Until we get robots replacing guys with guns, that's going to be a recurring failure mode for narrow elite rule.
When you get robots replacing guys with guns, then you've got a whole second set of problems to deal with them. Namely, cybersecurity goes from being annoying to being potentially lethal.
Which, if you think about it, is a slight recasting of the same failure mode: formal control of the instruments of force can become detached from actual control.
It's the same failure mode, but it's a much worse problem. For the (human) police to join the insurrection, they have to be persuaded that the insurrection is either morally right or too big to fight (which may mean that it's too big for the police to consider arresting/killing them all to be an acceptable solution). For the robots with guns to join the revolution just takes one really good hacker.
Anytime US police are shown on TV it's staggering to see how many are of them are obese. How can these police officers function in their jobs being so large? There must be yearly fitness tests to weed out people like that. Surely someone 6 feet tall 300 or 400 pounds can barely walk let alone run after someone.
US Police on TV look more obese (and in a top-heavy way) than they are because department policy very often includes wearing a bulletproof vest under their uniform shirt.
People on TV are the ones that are later in their career. A police sergeant is more of a middle manager and is often not out in the field. Fitness tests ensure new officers are not overweight.
FWIW, strength is way more important for policing and combat than being thin. Obese people who move around on a daily basis are usually quite strong. They have to be.
They'll never get that far. Even when desperate the 90% are easily divided against each other.
Disease, war, some other ecological disaster... a divided and very unequal nation cannot respond to these stresses. This is what ultimately balances things, it's a shame that so many many lives will have to be destroyed in the future because we are too timid to fix the problem now.
It's interesting there's theories that say it took the black plague to wipe out half of Europe and end the riches domination of the poor, end the dark ages, and ultimately start the enlightenment.
It's true that logistically there's always more poor than rich. That said, rich are only one plane ticket away from peace of mind. Surely their money is already distributed digitally so ..
But the democratic establishment does policies that are very similar to republicans, get all their money from the 1% and corporations, and I’d be surprised if progressives manage to break out.
And many Democratic voters find the current, establishment of DNC politicians to be delusionally far right of their constituents. See: Bernie, Ocasio-Cortez, and what I believe will be many more Dems with a leaning towards progressive policy.
If it's illegal for lobbyists, corporations, etc to donate to politicians, then we can make politics more fair/ethical. This is a bipartisan group working to get these passed.
> If it's illegal for lobbyists, corporations, etc to donate to politicians
It is illegal for corporations to donate to politicians.
But independent expenditures that aren't donated are another matter, which you can't eliminate without taking a big whack to the first amendment and core political speech.
It is not illegal for corporations to donate to political campaigns. It's also not illegal for corporations and lobbyists to offer jobs, to politicians after they retire from congress. Howard dean once a politician is now a lobbyist.
Corruption in America is perfectly legal, and the 1% carry a much larger voice than the bottom 90%, if politicians did what voters wanted it'd be a different story, see the video on that link for evidence that politicians vote 0% of the time with what the people want, and follow a more normal curve with the elites/corporations.
Money shouldn't = speech. This gives certain people more access to free speech, tips the tables, makes the country an oligarchy not a republic or democracy.
Imagine if all federal offices gave each person running $1 million dollars. Media stations gave each person 30 minutes/month during primaries and general elections for ads. No donations were allowed from corporations, and nothing from an individual exceeding 1000.
Imagine if lobbying were completely illegal. The anti-corruption laws (see represent.us link above) would fix this. It's a bi-partisan movement to fix corruption on BOTH sides of the aisle.
“Campaigns may not accept contributions from the treasury funds of corporations, labor organizations or national banks. This prohibition applies to any incorporated organization, including a nonstock corporation, a trade association, an incorporated membership organization and an incorporated cooperative.”
2. DNC Fund. (Automatically went to clinton in many cases, so it was another bucket of cash for her campaign. It should've been split evenly in the primary between her and other primary runners.
3. Promises. 'Hey larry, when you're out of congress, let us know if you want to work for our Posh lobby firm. Comfy pay and benefits'.
4. There own interests. Cheney / Haliburton. Anything about Trump.
5. Hillary Victory fund raised: $523.6M -- how many did state parties get of that?
6. There's a lot of ways to hide money. What about speaking engagements.. or other ways to 'pay' the candidate, so they can use their 'own' (but recently acquired) cash on hand? How much do the Clintons or Trumps receive to do a speaking engagement?
I don't know the answer to get rid of all corruption, but how is it that ISP's were able to give money to politicians who voted against net neutrality? INAL but here's a list:
Obviously they can give money, and do to move their political aims. To say they don't means you're living under a box. Maybe if they give it outside an election term when they're not running for office? That money from ISP's should be illegal, but it isn't.
> I don't know the answer to get rid of all corruption, but how is it that ISP's were able to give money to politicians who voted against net neutrality?
There are four things that are often described by activists and the media as donations by corporations (sometimes combined, sometimes just one or the other—the first and third seem to be the most common where dollar figures are given, because they are most readily available), in roughly decreasing order of the degree to which such descriptions are misleading:
(1) donations by employees of the corporation (regular individual donors with reportable donations must disclose their employer, and often donations by employees of a firm or industry are described as donations by the firm or industry.)
(2) Donations to “leadership organizations” directed by candidates (this is misleading when described as a campaign donation to the candidate, because such organizations are conduits that allow the candidate to promote other candidates), and
(3) Donations to SuperPACs that align to some extent with a particular candidate. (This is a wobbler in terms of how misleading g it is, because some superPACs are essentially focussed on a single candidate, and some are more general.)
(4) Donations from a corporate “separate segregated fund” (this money doesn't actually come from the corporation as such—it is separately solicited from managers and shareholders—but is directed by it.)
The particular article you refer to expressly combines the first two categories.
So, to completely ban the contributions identified in that article, you'd have to prohibit anyone with a job from contributing to a political campaign, and to eliminate everything commonly portrayed as corporate contributions, you'd have to also outlaw independent expenditures (which are what SuperPACs do) on political advocacy.
Have a political fund, for each election. Every person gets the exact same amount. They cannot use own money or donations. They must use the money given. Whoever wins off that level playing field deserves to be the winner.
The New Deal was responsible for stretching the Depression out for several additional years. It was one of the most economically ignorant and harmful interventions in US history.
Food was actually destroyed during the New Deal to create artificial scarcity in agricultural produce:
This destruction of agricultural stock was based on the idea that the problem in the economy was low nominal prices, when that was merely the symptom of the contraction in the money supply as a result of widespread defaults and an erosion in lending.
The low nominal prices were a natural reaction to the reduced money supply, that enabled consumption levels to remain at their pre-crash levels. With their efforts to increase nominal prices by creating artificial scarcity, all the New Deal officials did was reduce economic output, and with it, consumption levels, resulting in lower quality of life.
The New Deal is the arguably the worst economic policy in US history. It turned the Great Recession into the Great Depression [1] [2] and has been an economic anchor on the US ever since [3] [4] [5]
That it has popularly been given credit for the WWII-era economy is doctoring history. That it still further has become the epitome of good economic policy is unbelievable.
I think Bezos is a bad argument for us being in a new guilded age.
When you look at Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, and perhaps even Gates, they had near total control over some aspect of the American Economy. And they used that control to make incredible profits.
Amazon is trying to do the same, but they haven't done so yet. Their retail business is not wildly profitable (if at all). They haven't monopolized online retail (and may never be able to do so).
Amazon may be the next Walmart, but they're not the next Standard Oil. And the market has priced in huge expectations that Amazon will eventually have to meet, or investor exuberance will wane.
> When you look at Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, and perhaps even Gates, they had near total control over some aspect of the American Economy
According to TechCrunch[1], Amazon controls 49% of the entire e-commerce market, and 5% of the entire retail market overall. They're also in a position to jockey for even more market share as retail continues to move online.
Amazon is in the perfect position to completely own e-commerce, so it's quite possible that we're just early in making our comparison.
49% could be the high-water mark; we don't know yet. If Amazon doesn't get a grip on the counterfeit product problem, sales could plummet. The switching cost to a new retailer is low.
But Amazon's war chest is near infite. Jet had half a billion in funding but was barely making a dent (while bleeding money) against Amazon and its unprofitable for anyone else pricing. Amazon barely makes a profit with their streamlined system so how can anyone compete with that.
And we've seen what they can do when a competitor emerges like diapers.com. They bury them in the ground Walmart of the 90s style.
> Amazon is trying to do the same, but they haven't done so yet. They are not wildly profitable (if at all). They haven't monopolized online retail (and may never be able to do so).
Please tell me you're being sarcastic.
They're hiding profits and just plowing all the revenue back into the business while undercutting both competitors and their own employees.
It's an open question if Amazon will ever be able to raise prices and reap those promised profits without losing marketshare to the many players that would love to take them down.
Right now I view Amazon as a very profitable web hosting company and a retail non-profit.
Google and Microsoft, for comparison, were both much faster to get to monopoly-level marketshare. Amazon, at 24 years old, still isn't there.
But a Monopoly on "stuff" and "moving stuff around" is a much more valuable Monopoly (pretty much by definition) than one in "eyeballs to advertise stuff to". Ultimately, the majority of Google's and Facebooks profits are from the advertisement of retail, services, and digital goods, which Amazon is trying (and doing very well) to monopolize. Sure, it may be harder to get there but the rewards are much better if you do.
Would you rather be Pullitzer (advertising magnate) or Vanderbilt (transportation)? I'll take the latter every time from a pure $$$ standpoint. Bezos is actually trying to be both.
You are in a minority when it comes to that. Most people still go to Amazon (me included) because it is far easier to find what you want there for a lower or at least more fair price. Convenience is what dictates this kind of stuff, and Amazon, work practices apart, is know to deliver stuff really fast and cheaper than most, being the most convenient choice the same way Google is the most convenient choice when it comes to web searches.
So because people are too lazy to go to a different website we must destroy the company of a very skilled businessman who's services millions of people use and enjoy?
Amazon is #1 because they are the best, not because they are evil. Google is #1 because they are also the best, not because they are evil.
That's what they have been focusing on for the last few years. A lot of the money they have reinvested has gone towards physical infrastructure (data centers, fulfillment centers, courier vehicles). Not only are they gaining a monopoly in moving physical goods from A to B but also information through AWS. You may not use their services but an increasing number of people are using them regularly.
Amazon (probably) makes about as much money from advertising as they do from their retail operations. When the margins for advertising is ~50% and retail is ~5% a little bit of ad revenue can go farther than a lot of retail revenue.
Of course that analysis ignores that the retail business is what allows Amazon to have an advertising business. But the GP is largely accurate. Amazon is most well known for their retail but it's not really what makes them the money. AWS is their cash cow and advertising is becoming their second.
I wonder if the USPS would or has considered running an FBA competitor (ship your items in bulk to a USPS facility, pay for the space, and then to have them packed and shipped via an API). Even operating at a loss, it might make sense from a tax receipt perspective if it spurs economic activity far enough above the subsidy.
> will ever be able to raise prices and reap those promised profits
That's mischaracterizing the situation. They're not unprofitable because they're charging less than they could, they're unprofitable because they pour their profits immediately back into growing other business avenues. If Amazon spent a quarter or two slowing/halting the development of new business ventures they'd immediately be profitable. If they spent a year doing that and also trimming prior unsuccessful ventures they'd be quite profitable.
It makes no sense for Amazon to turn a profit. They invest everything back into growth. This way the stock keeps going up, Bezos and co sell their stock and pay long term capital gains tax instead of income tax. This way Bezos can get a better tax rate than his secretary.
At Amazon's scale you cannot simply turn tens of billions of dollars into economically meaningful growth. If you could, and expect proportional increase in valuation, then nearly every company would be doing the exact same thing. Take for instance Apple. They are netting some $48 billion a year with much more than that on hand. They clearly desperately want to move beyond just the iPhone and have been trying all sorts of ideas, but nothing is really sticking. And so they've been left to resort to spending literally hundreds of billions of dollars on share buybacks to try to increase the stock price that way. If they could just invest their profits into growth and expect proportional benefit, that's precisely what they would be doing!
"Undercutting competitors" and "buying market share" is literally what defines competition. And this is phenomenally good both for the consumer and for the companies that are able to slim themselves down enough to succeed.
Comcast, for instance, isn't really a monopoly. There are numerous other big players in that industry. But the thing is that instead of "undercutting competitors" and "buying market share" the competitors all agree to cooperate and split up the market. The result is when you buy something from Amazon, you're hitting quite close to the wholesale cost of that item. And when you pay your high speed internet bill to Comcast, what you're paying is some large multiple of the real cost of service.
Often repeated, but wrong. Their financials might show almost no net income (just $3B) but that's just because they choose to reinvest every dollar of gross profits into themselves to grow.
Just look at their income statement: in 2017 they invested $23B into "R&D". These are profits they could have just taken.
Obviously, reinvesting in themselves has been a fantastic choice. That's how they were able to grow their revenues ~10× over the last 10 years ($20B to $180B)...
As long as reinvesting works so well, you will keep seeing a "meager" net income of $3B yearly.
Highly doubtful. You don't even have to trust the word of their financial auditors to get convinced. Just knowing that AMZN's growth over the last 10+ years was entirely self-funded is clear evidence they have cash laying around to reinvest into the company.
I wouldn’t say google dominates the internet overall. They may dominate your internet as the way into most of the internet for you is google (or some other search provider). For a large number of people, especially in the developing world, Facebook is the internet. But perhaps such people mostly access the internet with android phones and so have sort-of-google phones and perhaps use google maps and google play store and such.
> I feel that America is in the midst of a new gilded age; instead of Standard Oil, we have Amazon.
Except that Standard Oil probably had real oil (asset) and Amazon now has an inflated valuation based on potential future earnings.
Apple to Oranges in my opinion.
> The US economy isn't just about how comfortable the average US citizen is
If people are comfortable, they'll accept whatever. Look at the middle-easter countries (Dubai, Qatar, Kuwait). Look at the American people pre-2008 crisis.
The people of America are being squeezed by relentless financial predators (like banks), expensive wars that they have to fight and support (or maybe not but they are paying the price), globalization, expensive bureaucracy, etc...
>Standard Oil probably had real oil (asset) and Amazon now has an inflated valuation based on potential future earnings. Apple to Oranges
Amazon has a dominant market position in online sales. It's not a natural resource but it a position that affords it strong economies of scale and, eventually, monopoly rents, just like those earned by Microsoft, Facebook or Google in their markets.
Everything you really don't need is cheaper, everything you do need (rent, groceries, education) is much more expensive while wages haven't increased since the 90's.
And inflation is completely within the desirable range, as it always is, regardless of any real world price changes.
On a positive note, it is encouraging to see a much broader of diversity of opinion on certain topics lately, where one year ago many of the comments in this thread would have been heavily downvoted. I believe there is a genuine change of sentiment underway even among the well paid tech classes.
I agree that certified education got more expensive.
Education price in general got much cheaper with the Information Age. Just look at the body of knowledge that is available to everyone through scihub but also through legal venues. With enough of drive you can pick up a lot of knowledge for free.
If you’re smart you can self-educate yourself in many areas to a better level than 80% of the ivy-league alumni.
What you don’t get is:
- certificates with prestige
- network
- extrinsic motivation
You're minimizing the value of "certificates with prestige". The reason they are valued is that they are a very quick and easy indicator of ability, even if they are only moderately accurate. It's incredibly difficult to judge the ability of someone who is self-taught, you have to dig into their self-study plan and prior projects. If you need to evaluate and sort 10 candidates in 2 hours, you don't have time for that type of research.
With the internet what it is, there ought to be a way to make this evaluation process less labor intensive.
And not only that, it's crazy how much the simple act of going to a university and surrounding yourself with other university educated people contributes to raised wages. For example, I have met a factory worker who through the internet have read a ton and learned several topics to a high level in his free time and he is undoubtably driven but there are so many behvioural and cultural reasons why people would pass over him in an instant.
This is a common argument, but not sure I buy it. Sure, going to university helps a person identify established business and social norms, but so does working and interacting in society.
Anti social folks who don’t go to college will very likely still be anti-social if they do.
The main benefit of a standardized certificate is that it helps people evaluating your skills do so more easily. There’s no question that a smart hard-working self-taught super-social person will have a harder time than a less skilled person who has a respected institutions stamp of approval.
Rent can be fixed by moving. A lot of people move out of California and NY for a better life. Companies will follow.
College and education are being disrupted. Hopefully online courses and independent certification can fix the problem soon.
Healthcare is expensive because people in US are obese and unhealthy. And there is a lot more treatment for previously untreated problems but at a very high price. Go walk around a hospital to see where your insurance money is spent.
"Dr. Baumol’s insight in the 1960s was that costs inevitably rise fastest for things that are difficult to automate, including medical care, garbage collection and the live performance of a Mozart string quartet.
It came to him in the middle of the night.
“It was 4 in the morning,” he recalled in an oral history. “I suddenly woke up and said I know why those costs are going up! I got up, wrote down a few notes, and went to sleep again.” His theory became known as Baumol’s Cost Disease."
The silver lining of this interpretation is that it implies our current trajectory to be cyclical, and not exponential. We may have to re-learn some lessons the hard way in the meantime, though.
Even though teachers are woefully underpaid here like most other state workers other than those who write laws or live in the governor's mansion there hasn't been a teachers strike in Florida for some time. See, for ex., http://news.wfsu.org/post/its-been-50-years-florida-teachers...
Why not golden instead of gilded? Per capita incomes are at an all time high, in real terms, and growing; violent crime per capita a historical low; and life expectancy high, though it could be higher. We are on the verge of tremendous technological advances in propulsion, AI, biology and energy. And more people are educated enough to wonder at those advancements than ever before.
> Do you really not understand how per capita income is not a meaningful statistic in a situation where income inequality is extremely high?
Real median household income in the United States is up 20% from 1984. At 0.5% a year, that's less than it could be. But it's still objectively better than it was then, and much better than it was after WWI. Life today is better--for most Americans--than it was at virtually any time in the past.
> When I worked at Amazon we had to run around the warehouse, bc if our pick rate fell below a certain number we stopped getting paid. There were bottles & bins full of piss at odd points, bc you were penalised for toilet breaks. A co-worker attempted suicide on-site bc of the stress
Aren't their margins like, razor-thin? Obviously at Amazon scale, even razor-thin margins mean huge profits, but that doesn't mean that you have any wiggle room within the profit.
Imagine you have 100 people working for you, and off of each person, you make 10 cents a day. Now imagine you grow your business and you have 1,000,000 people working for you. At 10 cents per person per day, you're now making $100,000 a DAY! You're rich! If you wanted to give back to your employees, just remember that each one produces 10 cents of profit. If you gave them all 10 cents extra per day, it means nothing to any one of them, but your business now makes $0 profit.
Not directly. But since people like Bezos own most of the productive machinery of the world, people really don’t have a choice except to work for one of the capital owners. In past times, people were free to work the land for themselves, as the land was held in common. Now somebody owns everything, and those of us who want to eat actually have almost “no choice” but to work for someone else.
Unless Amazon and the other mega-corps destroyed all the other companies that you could have worked for. Or if all the other companies have the same policies and work hard to set a fixed wage. Or if you have a criminal record and only Amazon will take you to pick packages...
Amazon’s net income per employee is 33,000 USD [0]. This means every Amazon employee could get a 30,000 USD raise and Amazon would still be profitable.
Net income, like the cost of their rent, inventory, infrastructure, R&D, advertising, acquisitions are all taken into account before coming to this figure? Or is it just employee costs like salary and benefits? I find that hard to believe, but if it's the case, then they clearly don't have razor thin margins, and what I said before simply doesn't apply to Amazon.
For 2017 their net income per employee was around $6,000. The parent claim is off by a factor of five. $3b in net income for fiscal 2017, and an average of perhaps 450k-500k employees for the whole year.
For 2018 they might produce $6b in net income, assuming they don't go on a big spending spree (which they're prone to do). They'll average perhaps 600,000 to 650,000 employees for 2018. So their net income per employee ratio is going to be closer to $10,000. It'll still be nowhere near the $33,000 the parent claims.
$33,000 in net income per employee would require near $20b in net income this year.
Amazon does in fact have extraordinarily razor thin margins, in their retail business. AWS is very profitable, with ~25% style operating income margins. It's providing all of the net income Amazon is generating now, retail essentially reinvests its thin margins right back into growth and improving fulfillment.
Walmart has 2.5% to 3% net income margins for example. Facebook is typically up at 40% to 50% for comical contrast. Amazon's retail business will spend most of its existence with 2% to 5% type margins.
Costco had a 2% net income margin for 2017. Target was at 3.9%. High volume, low margin retail is a horrendous business, very few operators can survive with such perpetually low margins. You have to execute at an extraordinary level.
The number is the net revenue (income minus all operating expenses, including salaries/wages, facilities, goods, taxes, etc) divided by the number of employees.
That's largely the value of his stock, though. Not defending him or the inequality as such, but it's not as if he's got $150 bn in cash that he could just distribute to his employees.
You realise that right now he has personally the money to give each and every one of his employees $256 000 in cash or stock options. Thats more than many of his employees make in 5 years.
Most of these people don't own their own house. Many of them have probably never travelled outside of the country.
That's not his entire company, thats just his own personal wealth. Imagine if his c-suite and upper management all pitched in too.
He does not have it as money, he has shares. Rich people do not hold substantial cash or bank deposits; at their scale it is almost criminally wasteful to do so.
His shares are market-priced. He is "worth" $150Bn because of today's share price, but there is no single pool of money available to buy him out. So in practice, he is worth a billion here, a billion there, so long as he doesn't scare the fishes.
If he transferred his shares to his employees, the price would crash and each employee's slice of the pie would not be worth $256,000 any more.
The same goes for creating a massive new supply of RSUs or share options. These dilute existing shareholders who, unsurprisingly, resent that other people get for free or at a discount what they paid for at market price. Accounting rules require these to be considered as expenses, meaning the reported profit or loss looks worse.
What would work better for Amazon's lowest-paid workers would be a higher wage. It's a more predictable and effective source of wealth sharing than showering lottery tickets from a helicopter.
The point was not to suggest that he actually did that. The point of my comment was to illustrate the incredible amount of wealth he has earned that runs counter to the idea that amazon can't afford to raise wages.
Amazon has 566,000 employees. We have to guesstimate their hours, but let's say it's about 1500 per year. That's probably really lowballing it, but even there that's 849 million manhours per year. Put another way, a raise of $1 would cost around a billion dollars. Don't forget that employers pay additional taxes and fees that scale against employee compensation meaning they get double tapped when increasing compensation. A one-off $1000 bonus for one year would cost more than half a billion dollars.
So exactly how much more do you think they should be paid?
This is the thing I think many people miss. Many companies operate on pretty thin margins. And while Amazon is well known for reinvesting their profits right back into the company, that's also the reason that they can afford to hire hundreds of thousands of people and pay them quite well for what is some of the most unskilled labor there is. You're looking at $13/hour for literally moving boxes.
Another way of looking at this is that we'd agree that America, as a whole, is quite a rich nation. Yet the surprising thing is that the entire GDP for this nation doesn't actually work out to be all that much. The GDP is of course just the sum value of the market value for all goods and services in this nation. If we completely split all proceeds from the sale of these goods and services up and divided it equally between each person, it'd only be about $60k. So exactly how much would be a fair share for a box mover in your view? Amazon has them hitting just below 50% and again I think it's quite remarkable that that's even possible.
And one final point here, keep in mind these values I've been mentioning here are averages. Talking about $15/hour for flipping burgers in [expensive city] is not really meaningful due to what is invariably localized price inflation. Many of Amazon's fulfillment centers are in areas where $13/hour is worth much more than $15/hour is in [expensive city].
That's true, but you could distribute stock more uniformly (since that's where most of Bezos's wealth comes from) and then workers would benefit from making Amazon successful.
I think a lot of the criticism on HN of capitalism is misguided and fails to account for some of the things you pointed out as well as the enormous rise in living standards over the last 200 years or so, but there does seem to be a tendency for successful people to accumulate far more wealth than they can reasonably spend.
Even with better conditions, if the rate of pay isn't enough for an employee to earn a living (food, shelter, amenities) even when employed full time, it's inhumane.
Why don't they just pay a humane rate and have humane conditions? Bezos is the only one demanding inhumane conditions and it doesn't have to be that way at all, it's an entirely contrived problem he invented to be a tiny little bit richer.
Hardly. He’s a pauper compared to John D. Rockefeller who died in 1937. At the time of his death his assets equaled 1.5% of America’s total economic output.
With a $20T GDP that would be a $300B net worth in today’s dollars or around 200% what Bezos is worth.
Don’t worry. This second gilded age that we are living in is on track to ensure we have a trillionaire in short order.
>With a $20T GDP that would be a $300B net worth in today’s dollars or around 200% what Bezos is worth.
That's close enough, and hardly make him "a pauper compared to JDR".
And of course, you got to also examine how the rest of "America’s total economic output" was divided back in JDR era compared to today.
Perhaps JDR had 1.5% of US output, but the rest was more equally distributed. E.g. today Bezos might have "just" 0.75% but a larger percentage than in JDRs time might be held by people like Bezos (and in all likelihood it is).
In other words, what's important is how much more not just the richest man, but the top say 100 rich commanded then and now?
And Mansa Musa who would have had a modern net worth north of $400B. He nearly destroyed a regional economy when he went to make hajj to Mecca just doing his personal shopping and handing money out to beggars, some would have it that he had to take out ridiculous loans to try and undo some of the damage he did by dumping 1.5 billion dollars plus of gold into the economy.
Indeed, also Augustus Caesar owned (or at least claimed to own) Egypt as his own private property. That would be difficult to quantify in modern terms.
Ironically, Rockefeller's wealth grew quickly because of regulation. Trustbusters broke up Standard Oil into different companies and investors kept bidding up the prices of the different pieces.
Agreed; it's the same GDP vs wealth comparison often railed against on here. Comparing a rate-of-gain with an amount-of-same-thing-already-gained is unsound at best, if not outright misleading. If we're going to use GDP on one side, we should measure how much Rockefeller/Bezos is gaining each year on the other. If we want to use their individual wealth, we should compare to total wealth of all US persons.
Bezos will surpass that several times over in the next few years. He's added tremendous economic value which is why so many of us pay him for his many products and services.
In my opinion, the biggest risk to Bezos' wealth is the same thing that drew me into the service to begin with. In the mid-to-late 2000s it was easy to go to Amazon, search for "thing I want" and blindly purchase the 4.5-5 star item with enough reviews to appear legitimate. I could do this and expect to get a great product _every_ time. Now, I find myself spending an hour screwing with the filters and reading reviews to figure out which listings are noise with fake reviews and which ones are for real. And even then with many products fulfilled by Amazon, you end up having to read reviews to figure out which seller to buy from to get the real item and not a counterfeit.
This combination of fake reviews and counterfeiting is what I think threatens Amazon's position. I don't make many large purchases on Amazon any more as a result of the risk, and those that I do make are fulfilled by the manufacturer so I know what I'm getting is legitimate.
>reading reviews to figure out which listings are noise with fake reviews and which ones are for real
I thought I was the only guy looking for patterns in Reviews and grammatical style to eliminate fake reviews.
Amazon has an insane amount of traffic making it the ideal choice for Chinese electronics makers who have lived or studied to america. They understand western marketing and psychology and it's fairly easy for them to manufacture clones of something that works really well in those countries at lower cost. The products are often flooded with 5 stars rating , mostly incoherent.
Honestly, I fucking hate Amazon. I love going to a store, feeling the product and then deciding if I like the look and feel of a product. And Amazon doesn't even carry good stuff anymore. It's all just junk nowadays, and the useful stuff is often overpriced or out of stock. I want somewhere where I can find unique, good quality brands, and brick&mortar will always be best for that.
Honest question: what stores have this quality? I find that other than local or high-end/"boutique" stores (with much higher prices), I do not have the same experience.
And even if you check something out in person at a retail store and go buy it on Amazon, there is a chance you receive a counterfeit. A very, very high chance for some items.
If modern history goes back to the 1900s though, Rockefeller still has Bezos beat by more than double:
"By the time of his death in 1937, estimates place his net worth in the range of US$300 billion to US$400 billion in adjusted dollars for the late 2000s (decade)."
Nah, he says the only worthwhile end for his money would be space travel. The man who pays his employees so little that 40% of them are subsidised by the taxpayers (food stamps). The man who gained 50 billion dollars in less than a year.
Agreed. Where are the Bezos donated schools, parks, hospitals, fire departments in Seattle? He has done nothing for Seattle except replace its citizens, driving them out into surrounding towns/cities/counties, and drove so many into homelessness that Seattle now has one of the largest homeless populations in the USA. It makes me absolutely furious when he says there's nothing he can do except build rockets.
Mary's Place is really his only contribution to Seattle. It houses a whole 65 families.
I think the research branches of a university are much less ambiguously positive than the teaching branches. One of the things people consistently fail to grok is that community colleges of the sort that are generally fairly cheap, are cheap in large part because their mission is to make higher education accessible. Universities do not (and probably shouldn't) have that mission. Their mission is to fund original research that would otherwise go undone and record it.
I wonder if general research is really a great charitable investment either. Medicine seems the most obviously positive research initiative to fund, but looking at the last few decades of medical research, I don't see many discoveries that have demonstrably improved human well being.
In the big picture, research needs to be balanced, because it builds on itself across fields. Medicine needs physics, computer science, biology, robotics, chemistry, material science, math ... (think drug discovery/modeling, materials for implants, sutures, techniques for laparoscopic surgery, medical records, virology, ... everything). Each of these fields has cross-dependencies as well.
The real thing that's needed is investments in high-risk, long-term fundamental research. Companies have a very hard time doing things with long, risky timelines (and justifiably so, they have a bottom line to account for in general). In _all_ fields.
> "Gates would have had a net worth of more than $150 billion if he’d held onto assets that he’s given away, largely to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation."
Sorry Bezos, you've still got some catching up to do. Lifetime earnings are what really count, even if you give it all away to charity.
People who would feel guilty with billions don’t get billions. And I would argue they shouldn’t. If you’re a billionaire, you get to unilaterally do things others can’t. Like pioneer space travel or explore under-appreciated branches of medicine.
It's pretty well documented that a lot of the lavish philanthropy of gilded age barons like Carnegie and Rockefeller was motivated by their guilt and concern about not being able to thread a camel through a needle. I don't know about the religious motivations of our current crop of billionaires, but presumably a lot of the same motivations are at play, since human nature hasn't changed substantially in the past 100 years.
Wow. Since Amazon's IPO in 1997 (21 years ago), that's like earning $227/sec, $13k/min, $817k/hr, $19m/day, 7.2b/year, and, 150b/21 years. To put it differently, you could either hire jeff bezos for a year, or 60k "highly" paid software engineers. He's richer than God. (yes I know these comparisons are useless since it's based on valuation based on a single point in time, but it does give it more perspective)
That's misleading though, because he's had great risk of ruin and lots of smart people have tried (Jet, Azure, etc.) to compete with him but have fallen short.
Compare Amazon to something done by government like the highways. When I order something on Amazon it nearly always arrives exactly on time as expected. Highways are always in a state of disrepair and congestion, and get worse every day.
This is not an example of why Bezos wealth should be used to build highways. Every penny of his wealth was earned by offering services in a competitive market better than the alternatives. With government infrastructure there typically are no alternatives and so nobody cares or expects much.
Bezos is not an enemy of the little guy, he's someone who has made it so much cheaper to build a startup. Remeber the days when the first $200K of fundraising would go straight to Dell for a bunch of bare metal hardware? Contrast that to AWS. He's done the same in many areas of the economy.
Not really. It's not an actionable metric but it doesn't change the fact he's filthy rich and I wish I could trade net worth with him.
>Bezos is not an enemy of the little guy
Indeed, he's the opposite. I clear international freight through customs for a living... it amazes me how many people/companies import direct to Amazon for FBA selling.
Yeah, Amazon certainly hits you hard with fees if you go FBA and even just using Amazon as a payment method is more expensive than a traditional credit card merchant account (I know it's Chris Bair's most expensive way to be paid by customers for Keto Chow) but Amazon offers all sorts of exposure for enterprising individuals and companies.
As lousy as compensation to employees may or may not be, there is no shortage of people willing to take the rather well-paying jobs (Amazon starts at like 13$ an hour in Indy with minimum wage being 7.25).
Amazon wouldn't even EXIST without those highways which are "in a constant state of disrepair and congestion." It's fair to say that their delivery vehicles are making it worse. Maybe some of his wealth should be used to improve or expand them?
As far as amazon being that great, a lot of the time their stuff is in fact late, and people on their marketplace sell counterfeit items. They also treat a lot of their workers like garbage.
I agree with you on your other points, he's effectively beaten the competition and Amazon is great in many ways, partly because they are so, so convenient, but I wouldn't paint him as some saint of good capitalism
Comparing both in terms of wealth is not fair and square.
First. They might have different purchasing power. Bezos can't liquidate $150bn of AMZ stock without slippage. If he could, then there must be another party willing to put $150bn of cash. Not many such parties in this world have that kinda cash laying around.
Second. They have different volatilities. $100 in cash is worth roughly $98 by next year. $100 in xyz asset might be $50 or $200.
Third. Holding an asset might have unrealized tax positions. I don't know the fiscal laws of America. But I think bezos will have to pay a significant portion of the liquidated asset since he is going to make profit. If you have $100 in cash, you don't have to pay anything. You already "realized" whatever profit.
But sure Bloomberg and Forbes would like to make headlines. That's their business.
What I'm trying to say is that this number is meaningless. Literally. Some asset management company has $6trillion under their management. That's x40 times more $$ power than bezos. But the bosses of these companies don't get as many headlines. Have you heard of BlackRock?
Asset management is not the same as owning the assets so I don't really understand that point. If you were to write up a balance sheet to measure the net worth of an Asset management company, you wouldn't really count other companies assets as their own.
I don't see how the wealth of one person, who's wealth is mainly shares in probably the most successful company in the US right now, indicates that we are in a bubble.
He didn't "make" it off them. This isn't from profit that he just didn't share with his workers, it's just the current market value of his stock holdings.
Which means it's paper wealth. Which means there's no way he could turn any significant fraction of that into USD or any other form of value without obliterating the value.
I've moved many of my tech investments into Amazon b/c of the steady track record and stable trajectory of good decision making and execution.
If the economy tanks, it makes Amazon's review data and free shipping even more valuable. If I'm strapped for cash I'm less likely to walk into a retailer and pay top dollar for something with no reviews.
Every single risk asset. Bonds (lowest yields in recorded history including negative sovereigns in europe), stocks (price-to-sales, price-to-ebidta, & countless other measures), art, housing prices back at nominal pre bubble highs, leverage in margin accounts, public debt, central bank balance sheets, etc. That was just from the back of my mouth. Not only is it a bubble but it's quite possibly the largest & most systemic one ever since so much risk has been shifted to the sovereign & central banking balance sheets.
I agree that based on historical prices, a large number of assets appear to be at the high end of valuation, but I don't know if it is already correct to call that a "bubble".
I prefer the Cliff Asness bubble definition, "the term bubble should indicate a price that no reasonable future outcome can justify."
Looking at a lot of those markets, it is definitely possible to see future outcomes that make the current prices justified.
The stock market? After the tax cuts, Shiller P/E is on the low side of the 20s now. With another few years of solid earnings growth, there's definitely a possibility of justifying these prices.
The bond market? Look at 90s Japan. That could easily justify those possibilities.
Art and real estate? We have more rich people who want to have their capital flee countries like Russia/China than ever. That is a trend likely to continue.
So I'd refrain from using "bubble". Valuations are stretched, but not absurdly so.
Everything doesn't "pop" though. I agree that we should expect lower longterm returns over the next few years. However, the difference between the NASDAQ in 2000 and "we expect the average annual return on the S&P 500 to be 4% for the next ten years"
Who really thinks that stock price has anything to do with ownership? Since no one can actually buy Amazon, it's "market" price is purely speculative. In both senses.
What are you talking about? A share represents a literal 1/485320000 ownership stake in Amazon and the market price of a share is definitely not speculative as I can go out and easily purchase shares at a given price.
If Walmart or Alibaba or some other sufficiently large enough company wanted to buy Amazon, they absolutely could. And they'd probably pay a premium over Amazon's current market cap!
In theory, If you are a CEO, and you knew your stock is in bubble, could you have leverage it and borrow as much as you could for low rate, say $200B or more for 2%, and use that buy whatever business when the bubble burst?
LOL, no CEO's in the modern era aren't interested in buying assets or growing revenues organically. They are interested in juicing EPS from quarter to quarter. That's why 2018 is already set to be the largest in record history of stock buybacks. That means corporations c-suite execs are deciding to go to the bond market & issue debt so they can take that money & use it as an open tender in the market every single day buying back shares so EPS gets juiced (smaller denominator). Then they promptly sell stock options to this new bidder on the open market... beautiful isn't it? 2018 will also be on record as the largest insider selling year & that's no coincidence. It's just like George Carlin said "it's a big fucking club & you ain't in it"
Not sure if when you say CEO, if you are talking about a CEO with his individual personal stock holdings or for the company itself. If its the former, it feels like Mark Cuban did something of the sort with his Yahoo stock with his own personal holdings in Yahoo.
The fiduciary thing to do if you're in this spot is simply to issue equity like it's going out of style: If the market wants to pay you way more than you're worth, take them up on it and stockpile cash for the lean years that are coming. That said, depending on the time horizon of your existing investors, this may not be popular and you may find yourself out of a job.
OT: I've always wondered, if some multi-billionaire became personally offended by some lesser multi-billionaire and decided to destroy them, what could they do? Assume that they don't want to do anything illegal enough to get themselves into serious trouble.
For example, suppose Bezos decided he really hated Rupert Murdoch ($15B). If Bezos decided he could happily live on a mere $100B, that would leave him $50B for the "Destroy Murdoch" project. Might not be able to actually destroy Murdoch for that, but could probably make his life very annoying.
Wow, that was so much more dramatic than I realized. These public fights (esp where normal people's jobs are at stake) are almost certainly a bad thing, but they're just fascinating to watch in real time.
Sure to some extent. But.. Say Bezos buys Fox News to wipe it off the map. Another billionaire or two would just start another version of it. The market is still there.
It's not that easy. Television and radio licenses are a legally-fixed supply. Someone who buys the broadcasting side of Fox would be able to start dragging its content hither and yon.
Whether that would prompt somebody to try a takeover of a different network is anyone's guess.
That said, the Murdochs are not selling Fox Network, which is usually what folks are thinking of in this context. They're selling the movies, TV series etc in exchange for a juicy slice of Disney.
Adjusted for inflation John D. Rockefeller is still the richest man in modern history. Today his fortune would have equaled 340 Billion dollars. More than twice Jeff Bezos current net worth.
It's not inconceivable that Amazon's market cap could double over the next 10 years. They still have a long way to grow and they're involved in so many markets...
That's crazy.
Let's say the average home price in the U.S. is $200K. If this was cash, he could buy 750,000 houses. There's about 250 million people over 18 in the U.S. so Bezos could buy a house for roughly 1 in every 330 adults in the U.S.
No, "could" doesn't mean "should". Saying someone "could" do something is speaking in the hypothetical which is most certainly not suggesting they do that something.
> And all his riches couldn't stop the planets demise from a insane economical concept, who's crazy ess he took to the next level.
I think this is an interesting point. Has Amazon grown industrial production and shipping and therefore increased net CO2?
Possible counterclaims:
- more informed purchasing leads to fewer discarded items
- centralized shipping is more efficient than driving your car to the store
It does seem like in the limit Amazon could have a profoundly positive effect on the net carbon of our products. It doesn’t seem like they are optimizing for that right now. Although and optimal strategy there would probably be growth first and then carbon efficiency when the growth levels off.
AMZN was $1,010 on 2017-Jul-17. Right now it's $1,813. That's a ~80% increase, so it's extremely plausible that his net worth went up by 50% (in fact, I'm surprised it didn't go up by more).
It went up by 50%, not 150. You do that by having most of your net worth in a high performing stock. Of course, in 3 weeks we may see an article about how bezos lost $50B in one day due to the same reason.
There is more money in circulation and it needs somewhere to go. Investors put it in stocks. This is part of the reason the entire market has risen, amzn is just at the front of it.
So it's similar to the $CURRENT_FAD coin valuations in that if Bezos were to try to liquidate all of his position it certainly wouldn't net him that publicised amount because there's not that much liquidity.
He's going to be many times over the richest person in history before long. This has been clear for a long time if you look at the rate of growth of his wealth. But it's not bad news. Bezos has an unmatched ability to create infrastructure that works well and is low cost.
E-commerce is a very competitive market and yet Amazon grows every day. Why? Because consumers trust Amazon's reviews and return policy. It's way better than what most retailers offer. The reviews are unparalleled and offer consumers tremendous power against firms that try to rip them off.
Reminder: Qaddafi was worth $200b[1] at the time of his death, and that was in liquid assets. Not an unsellable position in one speculative stock. Other notable heads of state that probably blow Bezos away: Putin, bin Salman, and probably Xi.
This thread is one of the prime examples of Hacker News being terrible when going off topic. You only have to read three comments to get to the most upvoted person saying the rich are at risk of violent revolution. A few more comments and people are discussing logistics of violent revolution, and whether police are too obese to participate or perhaps they act only in the interest of the 1%.
Your synonymous use of "educated" with "neoliberal" is notable. Those who ignore the views of the workers because they are not articulated in language they find acceptable do so at their own historical peril.
I didn't advocate any position besides that violent revolution is improbable. Is the improbability of violent revolution a neoliberal concept? Do I ignore workers when I state that discussions around police obesity are not grounded economic discourse? Is there any universe in which this conversation leads to a reasonable place?
>Do I ignore workers when I state that discussions around police obesity are not grounded economic discourse?
Well it's not economic discourse at all, it's political discourse.
>Is there any universe in which this conversation leads to a reasonable place?
You're against the conversation in general? It seems that you think discussion of inequality leads inevitably to the idea that we should engage in violent revolution. If that's the case maybe violent revolution is the most reasonable place.
What exactly do you have a problem with? You want discussions of inequality to center around police obesity more? Or did you perhaps not know that the order of comments can change?
I am literally pointing out that the top few comments were centered around violent revolution and police obesity. I'm not saying "inevitable slippery slope", I am literally describing the content of the first few comments at the time. If your conclusion from this is that violent revolution is the most reasonable then you just wanted violent revolution in the first place.
And no, this conversation didn't lead to a reasonable place, seeing as you're now here saying that I, because of a hacker news comment, am justification for violent revolution.
Our current version breaks down in the global internet economy with digital platforms and digital retailers, where simple brands combined with external capital have the ability to turn companies into supermassive black holes for consumer attention. As we know from math, singularities need special care, so we better start thinking about how we could fix the situation.
We are now at a point in history where the average human is better off than ever before. Capitalism has pulled more people out of poverty than any other system. If someone who radically changed the world has a ton of wealth, good for them. Jeff Bezos having money has no impact on my ability to succeed, if anything it has positively affected it as he has created so many new jobs
Putin tops him. At these levels the dollar value is not a good measure. Bezos owns shares. If he started selling them their value would quickly drop. Monarchs (Putin) are different. They own things outright, or have such influence that they effectively own things that are legally in other people's names. The Saudi royal house has more wealth under their king's control, although not all in his name.
What is scary is the math when calculated in how many person-years someone like Bezos can buy. Divide his net worth by a reasonable cost for a soldier. Bezos could hire vastly more troops than Henry VII could have in his day.
$150,000,000,000 / $80,000 = 1,875,000 ... he could theoretically field an army large enough to sway any modern conflict. In person-buying potential, his wealth is on par with Genghis Kan or Stalin.
Interesting idea for a measurement! That amount of money can certainly buy an army, but doesn’t account for equipment, logistics etc.
Comparing it directly to military expenditure by states is interesting [1,2]:
If spent over a single year it would be 3rd highest expenditure (second is China with 150-228 billion)
Could fund a military the same as France or Britain for 3 years
Equals the combined spend of Britain France and Germany over 1 year.
Stalin could "buy" vastly more than a 1.8 million person-years. There were approximate 10x that many Soviet citizens during his lifetime, and he was in pretty much total control of all of them, for as long as he wanted, not just a year.
How much of those assets could a Putin or the House of Saud liquidate before risking a coup? If we're playing speculator, shouldn't we consider risk of "devaluation" for both?
Re: monarch, the rule of law is the baseline for not being one. And laws don’t really apply to Putin. He’s able to hold onto the presidency for as long as he wants it, and assassinate whomever he wishes.
According to this source [1], dictator not monarch would be the proper term, as the transfer of power for a monarchies is familial, and the transfer of power for a dictator is political/a coup.
Without seeing into the future, everything since 1917 has been the latter.
This is kind of obscene. Even more so since Bezos shuns the kind of charity work through which other multibillionaires like Gates and Buffet shoulder their noblesse oblige.
The difference between Bezos and Gates reminds me a lot of the difference between Jobs and Gates, in terms of philanthropy.
Gates has been very public about the plans for his wealth since at least the mid 90s, famously saying that his kids would only inherit a few million. He's regularly committed very large amounts of his capital and time to his philanthropic organization since it was started in 95.
I admired him back then, and even more-so now that he's followed through on his commitments and his encouragement for other billionaires to do the same.
I get the impression that he understands that hoarding huge amounts of wealth commits you to using that wealth for the public good more than most other billionaires.
Jobs was never publicly philanthropic (and actually shut down a lot of Apple's internal philanthropic work himself when re-instated as chief), and the best that we've gotten from Bezos so far is the nebulous message that philanthropy is in his future, but not now. Even Zuckerberg is doing better on that front.
Bezos may turn it around and surprise us, but right now we don't really have much data to support that.
I think Steve Jobs though, moreso than Gates, drove Apple to produce the kind of products he thought the world needed. Regardless of whether Jobs was delusional on this point, I think it’s clear that he put his values ahead of the profitability of the company, and ahead of his own career at Apple. His ouster is evidence of that. He was not protecting the throne.
Gates did. He was no Larry Ellison, but he was a raw competitor. He wanted Microsoft to win. And his vision of what a computer could be was limited to “whatever the best thing Microsoft could come up with is.” Jobs didn’t care what Apple the company was capable of, he was driven by an external vision of what the world needed and he shaped Apple to match that.
Gates killed a lot of good companies out of sheer competitive ferocity, and we suffered because of it. Computers are less good today because Netscape and Word Perfect and Samba were mercilessly fucked with. And we’ll never know how many products were delayed by decades because of the chilling effect Gates deliberately created. I think in a real sense he owes us for that.
Jobs did what he thought was best for computer users. We can debate whether he knew what was best, but I think his approach comes with less karmic debt.
Anyone with more than $50K net worth is or ought to be keeping nearly all of it in investments of some sort, what you're calling "virtual money". It's no more virtual than your 401(k) or Schwab account or home. By your logic, nearly the entire American economy "doesn't mean anything."
But he's got most of his investments in one sort, stock in AMZN. It's not a secret that there isn't $150bn of liquidity at the B/A price. If he tried to unload those shares he wouldn't get anywhere close to their calculated value. That's what GP means by "virtual" it exists on paper but any tangible use of that quantity will change it . Not only is there not enough liquidity at that price, but once the market learned he was unloading a substantial quantity the price would become depressed (not sure what the technical term for that is).
I think you miss-understood my statement. They calculated $150B based on is 16.4% stakes in Amazon, 100% financial assets (stocks). Yes, you can convert it into real assets at any time, after vesting period, but as the CEO and founder of Amazon, he can't do that. So the point is, he is still considered the richest man on earth at the moment, but he can't still spend $100 billion tomorrow on a gigantic island. So, yeah, $150B doesn't mean anything. It's just a random number.
If you sell off your 401k, the stock price dips a fraction of a cent. If he sells his Amazon holdings, the value completely craters. In that way, his holdings aren't necessarily worth what the market currently says they are.
AMZN stock is currently not legal tender and government agencies and the like are not required to accept it as a form of payment. Can't pay for food with AMZN shares.
The US dollar is backed by the "full faith and credit" of the US, which makes it "real" in some sense
In other words, AMZN stock is as real as Amazon the company is, and USD's are as real as the US is. Where one has some assets and some shareholder agreements to back up its reality, the other has guns, a voting populace, and global-scale international recognition in favor of its reality.
I mean, my house isn't backed by the full faith and credit of the US, but I'd still consider it a form of wealth. Pablo Escobar is about the only guy I know who kept all his money in cash.
Like the late 1920s, we saw losses in purchasing power of the average American, the collection of wealth among the top 1%, and disruption of our civic spaces as a result. I think the thing that many Americans aren't aware of was just how violent that time in US history was[1].
The US economy isn't just about how comfortable the average US citizen is, it is also a measure of how much cushion there is in our society between us being frustrated looking at a job board and being angry and armed in the streets. The teachers strikes in Oklahoma, Florida, and W. Virginia are showing the rise of Unions (much like in the gilded age as well). Protest and civic engagement must be our response, we should take signs like the wealth of Bezos as a cautionary tale, rather than something to simply marvel at.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Matewan
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1920_Alabama_coal_strike
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain