[beat]

Read Peter Thiel. The perfect capitalism of frictionless competition and complete transparency is the enemy of its own intent. In highly competitive and transparent markets, profits are driven asymptotically to zero. Groceries, gasoline, airline tickets... these are extremely low-margin industries.

Capitalism succeeds only when capitalism fails - when monopolies (global or local) appear that permit high-friction (and thus high profit) transactions. This can be old-school abusive monopolies that we regulate against, or it can be monopolies of craftsmanship - products so superior to the competition that they're peerless.

At any rate, capitalism where everyone has similar information and resources works quite poorly.

[StephenCanis]

I just wanted to point out that Peter Thiel is discussing his ideas in the context of creating a very successful company. He is not talking about what system is best for society in general - rather what is best for an individual business owner.

Generally in economic theory companies in perfectly competitive industries have zero "economic profit" which means they earn enough profit to compensate the owners for capital invested. Effectively the owners are getting fairly compensated for the risk of investing their capital.

In a monopoly the owner is getting compensated not based on risk of investment but rather how much can be extracted from the customers. This is clearly good for the owner and not so good for everyone else.

Creating a monopoly based on a superior product is a good thing for everyone since you are innovating and creating something that was not there before. You should be able to hold this monopoly if no one can effectively reproduce it. However, any kind of regulation to maintain your monopoly is likely bad for everyone except yourself. In theory, without regulation you would expect most monopolies to fall or have reduced power as other players come into the market.

I think Peter Thiel has a very good way of thinking about the motivation for innovation in a capitalistic market. However, outside of brand new innovations, monopolies are likely bad for a society as a whole.

[sharemywin]

if you think of most of the unicorns they are held up by copyright. google, facebook, even say uber etc. if I can scrape their sites I could make a derivative possibly even better.

[StephenCanis]

Copyright and other protections allow a temporary (maybe not so temporary anymore) monopoly on your exact idea. That's a good way to spur innovation since you reward the people creating those innovations. You could still compete with any of those products and people still do.

I think temporary monopolies are good - permanent monopolies maybe not so much. It's an interesting way to think about capitalism that's for sure.

[lukasm]

> The perfect capitalism of frictionless competition and complete transparency is the enemy of its own intent. In highly competitive and transparent markets, profits are driven asymptotically to zero. Groceries, gasoline, airline tickets... these are extremely low-margin industries

Correct, assuming no extra wealth is created e.g. innovation

> At any rate, capitalism where everyone has similar information and resources works quite poorly.

For capitalists. I think parent meant it works best for the rest.

[beat]

Innovation is friction, I think. It's a sort of local monopoly - I have this benefit that my competitors do not have.

[ZeroGravitas]

I thought Thiel was some kind of hardcore libertarian? But really he's just into some old skool robber Barron stuff?

[beat]

No, he opposes the robber baron approach. He prefers indirect monopolies, built on technical advantage rather than force. His canonical example is Google. They have a monopoly - on search. Do they charge for search? No. They make money indirectly off their monopoly. And they maintain that monopoly by technical superiority. Anyone could write a search engine, and some have tried (Microsoft!). But the monopoly is natural, not a product of force.

[sharemywin]

it works great for consumers, employees, society, just not a good investment.