[mbostleman]

Companies would "pocket" the difference? What pocket would that be exactly? Companies are in competition. While company A, might "pocket" the savings, company B will use it to their advantage in potentially any number of ways - paying employees more, reducing prices to customers, investing in new equipment. You refer to the 8 million companies in the US as if they're one entity that conspires in lockstep. That's not how it works.

[heavyset_go]

This would suggest that things like this[1] could never happen because of competition, but they have.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

[nostrebored]

The philosophy of minimizing benefits to maximize salary is the one espoused by Amazon. It isn’t a hypothetical, it’s used by one of the most successful businesses on the face of the earth.

[mbostleman]

Collusion is the antithesis of competition. And it's illegal, hence the litigation. I am referring to the behavior of a free market, not an illegally fixed one.

[Calavar]

A 100% competitive free market is the analogue to a frictionless vacuum in physics. It's a convenient model for academic purposes, but it's not something that really exists.

[Daishiman]

There is no such thing as a free market. A free market is a spherical cow in a vacuum. Corporations are generally far more informed of the nature of labor markets than labor itself a don't risk an equivalent of getting a life-threatening condition while having no health care. Corporations also collude, whether directly or indirectly, in many fronts.

[fennecfoxen]

And yet the theories of the free market, like many physical models, retain significant predictive power!

[Daishiman]

In the grand scheme of things, in long-term timeframes, with huge error bars. Those error bars are big enough and the timeframes weird enough that it's not sufficiently useful even for entire industries over very human timeframes.

[fennecfoxen]

It's incredibly useful. Open up The Wall Street Journal and look at oil futures or go for a drive and look at the price of gasoline. Watch a demand shock (like a pandemic) drive the price down. Watch a supply shock (war with Russia) drive it up. Or go over to the Federal Reserve website and look at the size of the money supply and how it's growing, and then go to the store and see this drive inflation, or go on vacation and do some foreign exchange.

Amazingly, fantastically useful.

[JaimeThompson]

Does a free market exist anywhere on Earth?