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by lmg643
4258 days ago
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Wow. Talk about an advertisement for the ineffectiveness of annotations. I've got comments from multiple different authors on here simultaneously - who are all these people? I was interested in Marc's annotations - talk about bait and switch. For complex subjects, this is a great example of why single-author critiques are best, so you can follow a single person's train of thought and their logical conclusions (or errors). This particular debate strikes me as pretty juvenile in both directions - by Krugman, and his critics. Marc gets "closest to the pin" for me when he says "if Amazon was a monopoly, it would be raising prices." Of course, that's not to say any big company can't overplay its leverage in "supplier negotiations" and this is surely something worth discussing. Marc is also right that the judgment here is a lot more nuanced than standard oil owning 60% of the market. Going a little deeper on the Hachette dust-up, it's really interesting that the chattering classes never took much of an axe to Amazon's reputation until it tread on their turf - book publishing! All the waylaid mom-and-pop stores were just hicks who had it coming. Protecting the fat advances paid to big name authors - that is sacrosanct - part of the rewards that go with public life these days, and part of the corruption IMHO. I will end with Glazer's beginning - "Krugman nearly always gets it right...but this is very wrong." I find that this Amazon critique is easier to contextualize if you shift that understanding - Krugman is frequently wrong about many things, and this Amazon article fits neatly with that overall trend. |
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That's not really what he says, he said that if they raised prices, Krugman would take that as evidence of monopoly behavior as well. Monopolies don't always raise prices; sometimes they keep them quite low.