
Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted - japaget
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/corporate-america-hasnt-been-disrupted/
======
rayiner
I think there is a bit of cognitive dissonance in the tech community about
"disruption" versus "big companies." Technology, in general, makes it easier
to scale companies to large sizes, and "disruption" often involves using
technology to enter an existing industry that is dominated by small,
inefficient companies.

A great example is Uber. Uber is making the taxi market a lot more efficient,
but it's also well on the path to replacing a bunch of little local taxi
companies with a big national one. That's the power of technology: it pushes
out the point on the curve where diseconomies of scale cancel out economies of
scale. Technology enables consolidation. Other good examples are the dry
cleaning and food delivery startups.

It's also not surprising that once an industry has been "disrupted" it takes a
lot to push out the incumbent. Small businesses are generally inefficient and
prone to failure. Large corporations are efficient and diversified in
comparison. A new mom & pop coffee shop might easily out-compete the old mom &
pop coffee shop across the street, but they can't offer the scale and
uniformity of a Starbucks. When big corporations die, it's either because of
their own mistakes, or some seismic market or technological shift (e.g.
Kodak).

~~~
araes
Unfortunately, large companies can also much more easily engage in rent-
seeking behaviour ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-
seeking](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking)) which small competitors
can't engage in effectively unless they organize as a group (effectively a
small business union)

Even worse, rent-seeking is often a better use of money than actually
innovating in the market you supposedly compete in. If I can disadvantage all
of my competitors with horrific regulations that severely penalize small size
competitors, then I need to do nothing and rake in the cash.

So, its a tired refrain, but one of the other main issues is that our
regulatory and governance bodies are just not agile enough to deal with
companies that are, and actively manipulate them.

In some cases, that can be a benefit, as loopholes or slow response may allow
companies to get established before regulation catches up and reams them, but
if the big boys (JP, GE, Exxon, Apple, Walmart, ect..) are on the ball, they
can effectively kill whole markets as they appear. Just regulate them away.

~~~
rayiner
I've said this in other threads, but I think this angle is overstated by
people who underestimate the purely business advantages that come with scale.
Look at the tech industry, which historically hasn't had much involvement with
regulation and thus little opportunity for regulatory capture. Is Apple using
regulations to keep Jolla from succeeding? No. They use their scale to
amortize their OS development work over tens of millions of units. They use
their scale to invest in manufacturing processes and equipment that allows
them to release complex designs that competitors can't match at the same price
point. They use their scale to do in house CPU development, etc.

People want to believe that the free market means tons of little companies
duking it out. They blame consolidation on the government and rent seeking and
regulatory capture. But the fact is that there are massive business advantages
to being big, and the natural state of the market is in the direction of
consolidation (e.g. the trusts back in the day of Carnegie).

~~~
mindcrime
_People want to believe that the free market means tons of little companies
duking it out._

It would be interesting to create an actual free market and see what happens.

 _But the fact is that there are massive business advantages to being big, and
the natural state of the market is in the direction of consolidation_

Keep in mind that the entire notion of a shared stock, limited liability
corporation is a legal fiction which exists due to the State. Now one can
certainly argue about whether or not the world is a better or worse place with
or without corporations, but in a strict sense, corporations are a violation
of the idea of a free market. Since one of the main arguments _for_
corporations it they make it easier for people to pool their capital and build
large companies, I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that a corporation-
free world would be closer to "tons of little companies duking it out".

------
sadface
I have another suggestion for the decline in startup rates: health care and
college expenses.

The historically "prime" years for entrepreneurship are in one's late 30's to
early 50's, years when one typically has a family in need of healthcare,
college tuition, and hopefully retirement at some point down the line. In the
70's and 80's someone could leave the security of their big company, get
relatively affordable private insurance for them and their family, and sleep
moderately well knowing that even if their new venture fails their children
will at least be able make it through a state school working part time. Now,
they'll have to pay through the nose for healthcare and we all know how much
schools cost these days.

Given the increased failure rates of new ventures these days it's not so hard
to see why more mid-career individuals are remaining in corporate jobs instead
of venturing out on their own: it's getting too expensive to roll those dice.

~~~
pyrrhotech
I dunno, state schools are still pretty cheap. My sister's tuition with room
and board is $10k per year. If you are someone smart enough to be an
entrepreneur in your late 30s, you should have a corporate job paying 150k+
and can save all 4 years worth in a matter of months with a bit of
determination.

And health care, while expensive, isn't as big of a deal as most people make
it out to be. Get a high deductible plan and a family of 4 can be insured for
<$700/month. If you are starting a business in your late 30s you should have a
lot of savings already. While annoying, this shouldn't stop you.

~~~
superuser2
Where?!? University of Wisconsin, for example, is $24k in-state with room and
board.

To get through college for $10k/year in many places, you'd need to go to one
of the state's lower-tier schools in a small town and live at home. Not many
state flagships are in the business of charging less than $20k.

~~~
pyrrhotech
She goes here:
[http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg03_tmpl...](http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg03_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=1063)

She does live at home. If she lived at school it would be about $17k

~~~
superuser2
You said "with room and board," which implies living in university housing.
That would do it.

------
spodek
As a Professor of entrepreneurship at NYU's engineering school (that VC Fred
Wilson called a jewel -- [http://avc.com/2014/03/the-value-of-an-engineering-
degree](http://avc.com/2014/03/the-value-of-an-engineering-degree)), I can
summarize the problem in one phrase many of my students said when describing
their goals after graduation:

 _"... but I have to get a job at a big company to sponsor my visa."_

They're brilliant, motivated, and capable, but almost none are citizens. To
start new companies they have to leave the U.S. To stay they have to work for
a big company even though more than half are continuing their entrepreneurial
class projects after the course ended. There are options to jump through
difficult hoops, but those options are much harder for most.

So we motivate potential entrepreneurs to start elsewhere or give up their
plans. What if instead we motivated the world to start companies here instead
of elsewhere?

(Incidentally, we're organizing an event in October for non-U.S.-citizens who
found ways to start companies and stay here to help inspire others to find
ways to do it. If you're interested, especially if you know non-citizens who
found ways to stay and live near NYC, please contact me --
[http://joshuaspodek.com/contactconnect.](http://joshuaspodek.com/contactconnect.))

~~~
autokad
I know i'm going to be slaughtered in downvotes, but have the top schools ever
considered admitting more citizens?

~~~
dgfjnkngdf
My wife works in admissions at a top university... foreign students are
extremely attractive them because they 1. Pay full tuition and 2. Have very
high test scores.

~~~
ankitpanda
Regarding 1, shouldn't it not matter to the university who is paying the cost
of tuition as long as tuition is paid (i.e. loans are equivalent to a student
personally bearing the burden)? Seems odd to favor foreign students for that
reason.

------
api
I keep saying to people in valleybubble.io that the _rest_ of America is in
something like a depression.

It might not meet the strict economic criteria of a depression, but the
general sense is that there is no opportunity and that the future is only for
the 1%. Wages are going down (or nominally flat and losing ground to
inflation) and everything else is going up (or at least keeping up with
inflation).

This is particularly true if you're not in the top ten to twelve (mostly
coastal) major cities: San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Boston, "San
Angeles," etc. The gap between rich and poor _cities_ has noticeably worsened
in the past 10-20 years. In the rich ones, the poor are being priced out. In
the poor ones, there are no jobs and no routes to advancement. The long term
trend is toward something resembling The Hunger Games, with the alpha coastal
cities as "the capital" and the rest as "the precincts."

It looks not terribly unlike Japan post-bubble, but perhaps with streaks of
Gilded Age and the 1970s cultural malaise. It's not pretty.

------
schnable
Much of what we are seeing is the effect of our insane visa and immigration
policies.

The traditional entrepreneurial spirit of the United States was driven by the
culture of immigrants. Over 40% of the companies on the Fortune 500 were
founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. These were once
disruptive startups.

Now we make it very difficult for talented and intelligent people to become
permanent residents. So instead they stay home, or maybe go to Canada or
Australia.

~~~
bluedino
We have 7-20 million illegal immigrants in the USA out of 313 million total
residents.

How difficult can it really be to stay?

~~~
sdenton4
Illegal immigration is completely orthogonal to the topic. To run a startup,
you need to be able to operate your business legally, which means the founder
and employees need to be legal.

------
7Figures2Commas
In many markets, there are great opportunities to nibble around the edges of
the larger companies. The crumbs of many of these companies offer
entrepreneurs the opportunity to build six and seven figure annual businesses.

The way to win in markets that aren't likely to be "disrupted" is to go for
the crumbs, not the cake. It's a shame so many entrepreneurs have been deluded
by the appeal of "disruption."

Here's a Y Combinator example: Casetext says it is "disrupting" the legal
research market dominated by Westlaw and LexisNexis[1]. Anybody who has any
experience in this market knows how absurd this is. Bloomberg has invested
approximately $1 billion trying to make a dent in this market, with limited
success[2]. You simply cannot disrupt the incumbents because they have too
many advantages.

That doesn't mean there's no opportunity in the legal research market,
however. There are quite a few focused/niche legal research services that are
doing well. I know one that counts close to 90% of the Amlaw 100 as
subscribers. This service will never be a billion dollar business, or even a
$100 million business, but back-of-the-envelope math says it's a business most
founders would feel blessed to have started.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8011009](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8011009)

[2] [http://www.adweek.com/news/press/fortune-reports-
bloombergs-...](http://www.adweek.com/news/press/fortune-reports-bloombergs-
identity-crisis-154319)

------
ryanmarsh
For the purposes of this discussion we should dispense with the word
"startups" and replace it with "new businesses". Since 1970 the rate of new
businesses has been falling. Gee, can anyone else think of reasons why that
might be besides immigration and housing rates in the bay area? What a bunch
of navel gazing. Perhaps there is a causal connection with population age?
What about other factors? What if we zoom out a bit and look at general
workplace productivity factors and the impact of technology? Yes, that old
crusty stuff they are currently using which you don't consider technology.
It's actually a lot better than how things were done before, and before that,
and before that too.

And what about the rising number of old companies? Look at different
industries such as air travel, raw materials, and manufacturing. What I see is
Standard Oil all over again, consolidation, incremental optimizations, with a
little anti-competitive behavior thrown in to boot.

That's sometimes the problem with us programmers, especially the more naive
amongst us. We often believe that File &gt; New is the answer to the world's
problems when incremental optimization often is more pragmatic (and as the
market shows us, more effective). It isn't sexy but it "works".

I don't know much about Home Depot but I'm going to guess that they got as big
as they did (mostly) by introducing optimizations into the marketplace for
home improvement products. They are not a monopoly (such as taxi services)
that was _created by_ and protected through legislation and can dissolve
rather quickly (like it did in Houston this week) with a change in public
support.

The tech "startup" community should stop looking at companies like Wal-Mart as
evil and start to respect and marvel at the massive amounts of muda they have
been able to eliminate from product supply chains. Just because they don't use
Node.js doesn't make them disruptable (yes, I'm aware Wal-Mart actually does
use Node).

</rant>

~~~
DavidAdams
A similar thought occurred to me when I read this article. By not making a
clear distinction between innovative, true "startup" enterprises and new small
businesses following established business models, it's easy to make a grave
error when looking at the data. Yes, there may be fewer small businesses
starting. But I think a lot of that has to do with consolidation in industries
such as retail, hospitality, and food services.

Back in the 1970s, there were thousands of small, independently owned grocery
and retail stores that have been pushed out by large chains. I don't fault
people for preferring to buy their food and clothing from large, brightly lit,
lavishly appointed and stocked stores with low prices. Personally, I wouldn't
choose to buy my groceries at a rinky-dinky corner store that was common in
this country forth years ago when I had the option of shopping at a modern
Super Target. But that means that people aren't opening small stores and small
restaurants, and small inns like they used to.

But the loss of those businesses as entrepreneurship opportunities may have
drained a little bit of the color out of our country's culture, it hasn't
affected our innovation engine very much. If anything, the demands that larger
scale enterprises like Target and Kroger and Chipotle and Holiday Inn Express
for efficiency and logistics have spurred American innovation on, and the
expansion of these companies have made the average US consumer's life better
by bringing them a better selection of higher-quality products and services at
lower prices, increasing everyone's standard of living. (Admittedly, at the
cost of a degree of homogeneity).

So we could have fewer opportunities for entrepreneurs to start successful new
businesses, but still have expanding opportunity for a certain type of
entrepreneur to start truly innovative companies opening up brand new markets
and doing that "disruption" thing. We'd have to take a closer look, and
separate out new dry cleaners and dentists offices from technological
innovators.

------
rubiquity
Could other possible reasons be:

1) The companies innovating become large themselves and are now
indistinguishable from the incumbents?

2) Silicon Valley is in a venture capital frenzy. VCs make money by exits.
Innovative companies keep getting bought by the incumbents.

~~~
a8da6b0c91d
It's hard to overstate how important monetary policy is in this state of
affairs. CapEx has been plummeting for years because it makes more sense to
lever up with artificially cheap debt and gamble with equity. We see less
upstarts and less major capital investment by businesses because that's way
riskier than the guaranteed returns that can be got through other common
schemes predicated on cheap money.

[http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/the-
financialization-o...](http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/the-
financialization-of-american-business-how-cheap-debt-fuels-the-bubble/)

~~~
zanny
Ding, we have a winner. The entire state of the economy is predicated on the
effects tax policy has on where money is safest, and where money is least
taxed, and of course the money goes where the optimal returns for the lowest
risk are.

And those are not in entrepreneurship.

------
cushychicken
Though I find his point intriguing about corporate America entrenching itself,
the graphs he has chosen to represent it are a bit misrepresented - most
notably, the graph about startup failure rate. I disagree that the rate of
failure in startups has risen significantly in the last 20 years - he cherry
picked his data point from 1991 to 2011. The first fifteen years of that
interval remain almost entirely flat. The spike in the last three are easily
explainable as part of the housing bubble bursting that sent a bunch of
businesses in the US to the deadpool. Conversely, the declines in new
businesses in the early 80s and late 00s can be easily attributed to spikes in
the price of oil and the housing bubble bursting. The rate seems pretty solid
at about 10 percent before that.

I find the evidence he presents inconclusive at best. If anything, I find it
encouraging - no huge sea changes in the ability to start a business in the US
over the last 30 years, except for macroeconomic factors.

~~~
wldcordeiro
Agreed, on that particular chart at the 2010 point there was actually an
increase going forward after the 2007-2008 drop.

------
debt
_The compensation packages that tech companies are offering are outrageous._
Coupled with the fact that money itself generates better returns than most
startups.

Earning 10% a year over 10 years in some mutual fund is way better than
investing in some startup that'll be around for likely less than two years.

The housing market in the Bay Area is exploding. The salaries are going to
have to keep up somewhat with that explosion. Why would I run a startup making
50k in Chicago, when I can make more than triple that(with RSUs, options,
ESPP, healthcare, etc.) in the Bay Area?

 _Also_ , keep in mind the ground beneath us is shifting _constantly_. Some
web app written in Backbone yesterday may be slow as farts today. Objective-C,
what's that? CSS? Use SASS. Chef? Use Docker. I mean use AWS. I mean use
Digital Ocean.

I know it seems meaningless what technologies you use, but these are the
margins which people win by; the ability to be fast and scale quickly. Those
are just two aspects of probably a million other really important aspects in
running a successful startup.

Again, though, you have to work normal hours(so as not burnout) while paying
yourself enough to survive(forget the Bay Area). It's just not worth it to run
a startup given the economics. Unless you can secure a shit ton of upfront
investment. Which is unlikely unless the investor feels your startup idea
could at least outperform some other investment vehicle like a mutual fund.

------
wuliwong
Does anyone see all the data cited in the article as only kinda tangentially
related to what seems to be the main idea of the post? Isn't it possible that
"corporate america" is being disrupted AND their are less new companies being
formed? It seems simple enough to prove, if only 5 new companies started this
year and all 5 grew to be as large as Google, that would be some serious
disruption.

I am not arguing that their thesis is wrong, it just seems their supporting
data falls short of proving the case. I think a more telling dataset would be
a similar type of time analysis but looking at the top 500 companies by market
cap. How many are new? And that might not even really be getting at the
author's real point. Because, he's talking about upsetting existing
industries. For instance, sure Apple, Google and MS are pretty new. But did
they disrupt an industry or just make it through as the winners of a newly
minted "tech" industry? I'm actually asking because this question and thesis
is genuinely interesting to me.

------
brothe2000
I think the author of the article went looking for stats to support a title.
Corporate America has been disrupted however I think this article was looking
for financial failure versus adapting to the market pressures.

The corporations below have faced massive disruption:

Kodak, HP, GM, Ford, JC Penney, Sears, McDonalds, Radio Shack, Circuit City,
Best Buy, Borders, Barnes&Noble, IBM, Microsoft, Xerox, and Target have all
been disrupted.

But most of them have adapted as the market changed because they had the
resources to do so.

A small company has fewer resources so when adversity hits (housing crash in
2008) or the market shifts (Digital music versus record stores), those
business are less likely to be able to shift.

Regarding the comments in the article on Entrepreneurs:

I think the article is using too much of the 2000's data to make a correlation
to today. 2001 - 2010 was the dot com bubble, 9/11, unemployment at 9%, and
the housing / financial crisis. Banks weren't lending money and people had
little capital to borrow.

Compared to today: Banks are lending again, unemployment is 6.2%, people are
spending and earning more, and everywhere you read about startups and
entrepreneurs.

One last thing: I find it humorous when articles say that government
regulations, licensure, or taxes prevent innovation and entrepreneurial
activity. I have never heard somebody say "I'd totally build X but the tax
incentives just aren't high enough".

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
Who disrupted McDonalds?

~~~
brothe2000
McDonalds had to compete with coffee shops, places with Wifi, installed RedBox
to get people to walk into the place, and the general move toward healthier
foods and locally grown food. That's part of the reason they bought into
Chipotle.

------
jcfrei
Another simple explanation for the decline might be economies of scale or
economies of scope (or both) . Thirty years ago they might have had a smaller
effect on small businesses (like coffee shops and retailers), whereas nowadays
complex logistics (economies of scale, ie. walmart) or versatile production
facilities (economies of scope, ie. starbucks) have a bigger influence on
profits.

------
PaulHoule
I think the promulgation of the idea of "disruption" is itself an anti-
disruptive force.

The Microsofts of this world have seen the Kodaks and Xeroxes go down, so we
see them doing bold things. For instance, Microsoft saw tablets as a threat to
the PC, and they didn't let the fact that their customers didn't see it this
way from releasing Windows 8.

------
drcode
I agree with everything in OP, and this admittedly makes me sound like a
dreamer, but I think there's a good chance that computer-aided radical
decentralization is going to have a major effect on these numbers in the next
few years.

The possibilities of blockchain technology (and other technology inspired by
it) has barely even begun to percolate through society, and in theory it
allows free agents to fill roles previously only viable inside of
corporations.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Rad_Decentralization/](http://www.reddit.com/r/Rad_Decentralization/)

~~~
nabla9
Can you name any businesses where radical decentralization builds important
revenue?

As others have pointed out, technology seems to consolidate more than
decentralize. Network effect is opposite force to decentralization. Companies
like Airbnb, Uber consolidate previously small businesses under one huge
company.

~~~
drcode
> Can you name any businesses where radical decentralization builds important
> revenue?

Well, contrary to popular belief, making large revenue isn't the only viable
business model: The other viable model is to build something that greatly
hurts your competition's revenue. Here, "viable" means "it survives", I don't
think CARD is about making huge profits, it's about commoditizing scalable
parts of a business, removing scalability as a revenue generating mechanism.
(Airbnb and Uber are not CARD and I think will fail in the next 5-10 years.)

As for naming businesses: Only illegal business currently use this model,
unfortunately (some parts of the online drug trade, and to some parts of the
bittorrent scene.)

~~~
gohrt
> Only illegal business currently use this model, unfortunately (some parts of
> the online drug trade, and to some parts of the bittorrent scene.)

Which goes to show that the model is not competitive in the mainstraem market.
It only works where big centralized orgs are barred from entry.

~~~
drcode
Fair point.

------
vasilipupkin
Another issue is that as IT has become more prevalent in corporations, there
are just more jobs out there in existing companies for STEM grads - so they
feel less pressure to start new companies. But, I would honestly not take this
data too seriously. The latest startup tech boom is too young to judge. this
data is probably skewed by the tech collapse of 2000-2001.

------
itisbiz
"Revitalization" might be better word than "disruption" to explain what is
required of corporate sector.

But corporate sector is adopting "disruptive" technologies and methods such as
cloud, analytics, ecommerce. The problem is it is incremental and interstitial
rather than comprehensive.

------
gaius
"Disruption" really means using technology to find loopholes in the law e.g.
AirBnB "disrupting" hotels by providing services for people operating
unlicensed hotels. Do how do you disrupt a bank? Insider trading? Fraud?
Stealing deposits?

------
AndrewKemendo
So where is there a better environment for entrepreneurship? I don't mean
theoretically, I mean in practice.

Is there a country that has better infrastructure, capital markets, regulation
and market size? I am genuinely curious.

~~~
michaelq
Based on the criteria you mention (infrastructure, capital markets, regulation
and market size), there most certainly isn't one. The other large countries
have more onerous regulations and worse infrastructure than the US does.

But it's clearly not enough to say "the US isn't as bad as everywhere else" if
everywhere else is merely drifting toward consolidation more slowly.

------
pinkyand
I wonder: were past disruptive efforts more sucsessfull in unseating
incumbents ? And is Clayton Christensen theory responsible for bigger
companies' better defense against disruption ?

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
This is something that seems to be ignored in this discussion. There's a
widespread belief that large companies are stupid and unaware of what's going
on around them. However, the boom in easily available knowledge benefits
everyone, including large corporations. They may be "disrupted" but they are
also much more aware that it's happening and can take steps to adapt to it and
thrive in a new environment.

------
gregoryw
Private sector wages are quite high in places like San Francisco. Large
successful corporations are great at incentivizing would-be startup owners
into staying. Large companies are making money, the employees are creating
value, and they're realizing some of the value as personal wealth.

People launch businesses when they have no better opportunity in front of
them. In a rising economy with a record stock market, even the most capable
people are finding significant upside within the companies they're employed
by.

------
dicroce
democracy->oligarchy->dictatorship->collapse->democracy

~~~
michaelochurch
Actually, I tend to think that the Iron Law of Oligarchy is correct.
Dictatorships _also_ converge to oligarchy. The autocrat still has to rely on
his handlers and lieutenants for information. They become oligarchs.

Oligarchy gives way to aristocracy, which is more effete and less dangerous.
Oligarchs want to be powerful. Aristocrats want to be other things (e.g.
dignified, respectable, prestigious) and tend to let go of some of their
power. The problem is that some aristocrats see the power vacuum and rush in,
and then you get a new oligarchy, but one based solely on entitlement. That
tends to lead to collapse, from which all sorts of systems can emerge.

------
michaelochurch
First of all, it's pretty clear that the Valley isn't "disrupting" the
establishment. It is the establishment.

The elephant in the room: the death of the middle class.

Thirty years ago, unions were strong and average people had savings. Venture
capitalists were wealthier than average, but not of a superior class... and
they still hung out with people who wrote code for a living. Class distances
weren't nonexistent, but they weren't nearly as sheer as they are today. And
venture capital wasn't a requirement because bootstrapping was really
possible, because average people _actually had money_.

People complain about how the Valley is cranking out apps for spoiled 20-year-
olds instead of regular people, and missing the much bigger point, which is
that "regular people" are cash-strapped, time-poor, overworked and generally
disenfranchised altogether. The people building apps for spoiled 20-year-olds
are staking out the new, post-large-middle-class world.

Now, to bankroll a business you either need elite connections (usually to
people spending others' money) or outlandish luck, you have to have people in
your pocket who'll ensure coverage, and you'll probably end up taking a back
seat in your company as soon as you hire a "business co-founder" who can
deliver Sequoia and A16Z.

No one has a good idea what to build, and products and technology aren't
really the point (the point is getting bought; "startups" are a long audition
process for would-be corporate executives looking to jump the queue) but one
sector that isn't being targeted is the (disintegrating) middle class.

Corporate America, meanwhile, is stronger than ever. The wealth and
connections are even more concentrated, giving power to the few at the expense
of the many. And these Valley startups are the driving force behind all of
this.

~~~
maxsilver
Agree entirely. This is a perfect write up of the situation at hand.

> but one sector that isn't being targeted is the (disintegrating) middle
> class.

So, what (if anything) can we do to fix this?

Is there anything a regular person can do or work on to help the
(disintegrating) middle class?

~~~
Consultant32452
I would suggest joining unions and encouraging others to join them. With all
the nonsense coming out of Google, Microsoft and others regarding wage warfare
against their own employees I'm shocked that developers haven't unionized.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
There's way too much libertarianism, if not outright objectivism, in this
industry for just about any kind of organized labor to exist.

~~~
Consultant32452
Honestly, it's hard to organize people for any type of movement that are in
the top 10-20% of incomes in the country. Yes, we may all be getting screwed,
but we're still making bank compared to most.

