[carbadtraingood]

> There is this beauty of economics – you don’t have to make anyone poorer in order for you to become richer.

At any appreciable scale I disagree with this, or at least believe this ignores a whole lot of complexity.

Like, it totally ignores how profits are allocated within a company, for instance. Jeff Bezos got richer by making his employees poorer, for instance. He could have chosen to make his employees richer at the expense of making himself poorer.

It also seems to ignore the extractive elements of companies. Whether we are extracting raw minerals, agricultural products, or manufacturing capacity.

[sfvisser]

> Bezos got richer by making his employees poorer, for instance. He could have chosen to make his employees richer at the expense of making himself poorer.

No, they both got richer. Maybe Bezos had a chance to make his employees slightly more rich and himself less so, but ultimately no-one got poorer here.

[Volundr]

No one? What about the brick and mortar stores that lost volume? Or even the other budding online marketplaces that were choked out of existence?

[kansface]

They aren’t his employees?

[nerdponx]

I think GP is wrong-as-intended, but is still somewhat correct-as-written, indirectly.

Amazon's growth has pushed various companies out of business, reducing employment opportunities at companies other than Amazon. So any employee who works at Amazon for lack of other opportunities, and if those other opportunities would have existed if Amazon hadn't put them out of business, then yes, that employee is poorer.

This scenario is somewhat contrived on an individual scale, but it seems obvious to me that corporate consolidation and monopoly-ish-ization should lead symmetrically to monopsony-ish-ization in the labor market. But I am not a professional economist and I would be interested to see any actual research on this topic.

[aaroninsf]

This is not just wrong, but profoundly wrong.

The reconstruction of the American retail landscape that consumers experience only as "buying I guess kind of a lot of my stuff from Amazon" (or Walmart, or a very few other entitities; and their lesser-known agricultural oligopoly peers),

is so total at the manufacturing/logistics/supply chain/fulfillment level, as to defy our comprehension.

The world that we live in has had the mechanisms of how it produces and delivers goods to its citizens changed in more far-reaching ways within the last two decades than since the industrial or agrarian revolutions.

AND,

this reorganization has meant millions of people worldwide have had their utility redefined, and "optimized," to their detriment in terms of opportunity, income, stability, benefits, etc. ad nauseum.

To pick one straw out of the tornado: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38212124-nomadland

But that is literally one of a thousand examples; the "gig economy" and its infinitely examined (and litigated) sharp edges provide as many more as you would like.

Fast-fashion and next-day fulfillment and fungible goods from Chinese "companies" with machine-generated meaningless names clogging Amazon results pages, do not come at no one's expense.

TANSTAAFL.

[yobbo]

> There is this beauty of economics – you don’t have to make anyone poorer in order for you to become richer.

Actually, economics doesn't create wealth. Technology and industry creates wealth.

In the case of facebook, you'd have to make the argument that advertising budgets is creating more "wealth" in the hands of facebook than anywhere else. Advertising spending budgets are, in fact, zero-sum. Which form of advertising creates more "economic wellfare" is probably a normative debate, and we'd need someone motivated enough to have it.

But in the end, facebook's revenue comes at the expense of other companies' revenue.

[temporalparts]

Advertising spend is not zero-sum. Budgets are determined by advertising efficiency; if a new platform comes along that significantly improves cost per conversion, then you'd allocate more money than before. The reason advertisers are flocking to Google and Facebook is because of their advertisement efficiency (through targeting), and this has lead to an increase in overall advertiser spending.

[Cyberdog]

> Jeff Bezos got richer by making his employees poorer, for instance.

Poorer than what? Than being unemployed? I don't see how you can make someone poorer by employing them unless you forcefully ripped them out of a higher-paying job somehow.

[toss1]

>> don't see how you can make someone poorer by employing them unless you forcefully ripped them out of a higher-paying job somehow.

How?

Destroy the companies that previously provided higher paying jobs and are one of the few remaining opportunities that are not the unemployment queue.

WalMart was astonishingly successful at this. Their strategy was to move into small towns, on the outskirts where land was cheap, and setup a superstore that competed with basically every small business in town. Within years, 'Main Street' was a row of empty storefronts. It becomes one of the only places in town to work. The jobs at WalMart consistently pay so little that WalMart holds seminars for it's employees on how to get government assistance to survive. You and I are literally subsidizing WalMart's profits by enabling them to pay a sub-living wage to so many people.

WalMart so consistently made poorer everyone in the targeted communities that organized opposition sprang up. I watched it happen when I lived in Vermont, and it delayed WalMart's entry into the state for many years; a quick look still shows only 7 stores in the state, and there's still not a single store in the southeast.

WalMart was easier to identify because it had such measurable local effects, and it still took decades for people to catch up to their strategy and start to oppose it. Amazon's effects are much more diffuse and will take longer to measure.

So, yes, scaled-up organizations can literally rip out the higher paying jobs from under people and leave them no options. They can literally make people poorer by employing them.

[jl6]

> Jeff Bezos got richer by making his employees poorer, for instance.

How did he make them poorer? He took money from them?

[uoaei]

He literally said exactly that after landing from his first space trip! And with the slightest smidge of understanding of economics, that conclusion is inevitable.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/20/22585470/jeff-bezos-blue-...

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/jeff-bezos-thanks-amaz...

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-workers-react-jeff-be...