The problem is incumbents get lazy and start profit-seeking. Competition is the only way we know to have a chance of fighting it. The taxi industry got away with ripping off customers and having terrible service for ages. In my country they would regularly overcharge or take longer routes. Or you call and they decide not to come, or you walk around waving your hands frantically at a taxi hoping they stop. As a tourist, its even worse because you have no idea what the rate should be.
I don't know if gig companies or all VC companies are perfect, but lets not pretend industries regularly fail to innovate in the absence of competition.
Healthcare - the tech disruption in healthcare actually makes it easy to see a doctor over video call for small stuff and easy to track my records over time. The existing healthcare system requires me to call and wait weeks for an appointment and use some clunky UI to even message a doctor. And everyone knows how terrible insurance is..
Banks - In Canada, I can't get a single bank to give me API access to my own account. Their native interfaces suck, and connecting with Mint is frequently buggy. Mint itself is much worse than Quicken for browsing transactions, grouping, charting, but Quicken's API connection to banks sucks, despite also being built by Intuit. Crypto websites and apps are much better & provide great API access. If they had a trustworthy stablecoin, i would move in a heartbeat.
Education - university prices keep going up even as their model remains the same. Even as the actual content of courses is freely available online. University costs are insane, student debt levels are insane. Software is the first industry where the majority of what you need to know especially as you move beyond general CS comes from the internet, _for free_.
Electric cars/space - Reusable rockets were literally considered impossible a decade ago, they are reality now.
Like it would be great to have actual innovation. It would be nice if we had any meaningful anti trust enforcement or other ways to force innovation. But in my (relatively short) lifetime, i have almost never seen large scale innovation happen in the absence of competition. Any serious competition feels like "disruption" to industries accustomed to hanging out and collecting profits.
So I agree with some of your points: I.e. I think people would generally agree the user experience of Uber is an improvement over taxis even if the labour conditions are a regression.
The problem I see is that even the potential for disruption is consolidated in fewer and fewer hands. With IP law the way it is, Google and Apple acting as gatekeepers to mobile ecosystems, Amazon owning e-commerce and squeezing or competing with vendors who depend on it - the world is increasingly becoming a place where a project has to be blessed by one of a handful of giant corporations to be allowed to exist.
And it’s making things worse for consumers. For instance Disney buying up entertainment properties and putting them behind a walled garden, or MS doing the same with game studios.
Silicon valley made its name as a place where a couple people in a garage could invent something to change the world. It’s debatable whether it’s even worth trying anymore, since it’s such an uphill battle to compete with the giants. If you ask me that’s a problem and we should seriously think about the way IP law is handled.
> I think people would generally agree the user experience of Uber is an improvement over taxis even if the labour conditions are a regression.
I am going to make my point bluntly. Do you think the people driving for Uber are dumb? Every time I see this kind of argument I feel like it removes any agency from the gig workers. The implication is "Uber's drivers don't understand they are getting screwed. We need to change the rules of the game so Uber stops screwing drivers."
I have never seen a good argument for how Uber is exploitive that doesn't assume the drivers are to dumb to realize they are being exploited.
Not really no. Typically in the US try comparing health care services, since they all have different coverage, pricing model, duration etc... unless you are an economist with time and a robust model you can't say which is the best / cheapest. That's why the only way to give consumers a fighting chance is to actually create a market by forcing them to flatten their offerings.
Similarly in my country (I cannot say for other places) Uber driver's cash on hand is relatively good. But they are independent contractors so don't get a pension and no contribution for disability/maternity insurance. So it's hard for the drivers to actually price those externalities.
So no, drivers are not dumb, when markets are not clearly defined, companies are very good at making it hard to compare their offers with those of the competitors.
Would you say that everyone who falls victim to predatory lending is dumb? Or do people maybe get exploited when they are in bad economic situations as well?
Every week there are startups in Silicon Valley (and other places) building great products, getting more funding rounds, getting acquired, and going public. There are an infinite number of potential new market segments where the incumbent tech giants have no IP. Invent something new.
It's the individuals who invent the things that are truly the most worthwhile, and the small groups surrounding them who bring more prototypes into reality. The kinds of new things that can become universally desirable without so much actually needing to disrupt anything old or established.
The capitalists might still be able to offer the best leverage to approach universality, but 50 years ago their currency was drastically debased like everyone else up and down the food chain.
These are losses that have never been recovered, but it still left the surviving capitalists in much stronger financial control relative to everyone else. Millions more citizens of a quite smaller country were pushed downward into more survival-type activities in place of the structure which had allowed the benefits of increased productivity to trickle down. There was great pressure to reverse the flow of that wealth trickle, which eventually prevailed and grew exponentially, it became more & more of a "consumer economy", trickling up. Until the vast majority of individuals' generational resources that could be allocated to innovation have been tapped out along with all kinds of other stores of wealth which is the only way a recovery at the top could be expected possible in the fewest decades.
Capitalism is not the problem when it benevolently leverages innovation, the damage is done when it leverages greed. It does not have to be ugly if you can truly afford better, and have the conviction to carry it out.
But the more financial control and resources you have access to the more money you can always make doing carefully crafted financial deals involving existing wealth, most people in that position are less likely to accept something new anyway.
So you really need inspirational amounts of resources to permeate much deeper into the population because you need so many millions more people empowered to work more innovatively if they so choose, because that's where you find the potential to turn "nothing" into something to begin with. Very few will actually make the absolutely incredible breakthroughs, so you need millions to whom it is just plain more within reach.
Probably about like when a single-income semi-skilled paycheck could still support a homeowning or suburban family lifestyle. Even if it's not the suburban-living crowd you expect to be doing the innovating. Sheesh, that's about 50 years behind us too isn't it?
When Wells Fargo is sitting on kilos of gold, there's always going to be people who are so impressed that they can see no value in anything else. Especially not turning nothing into something, when there is so much wealth already accumulated there to desire or get their hands on in some much more expedient way. Even more so when almost nobody has any gold at all unless Wells Fargo shows up and puts some on the table. If there was ever really enough to go around, why you wouldn't need Wells Fargo at all anymore.
they absolutely did. the reason why they had no profit is because they reinvested every penny back in themselves instead of paying it out in dividends or hoarding cash
This is absolutely true, entrenched monopolies, or even a group a companies which have long since decided to stop competing with each other (e.g. canadian banks and phone companies) begin to charge more for less over time. Some of this is intentional too, like the way cities artificially limit the number of taxi licenses. Disruption can be good, but it only gives temporary improvements as a new monopoly will eventually take hold. It's a fundamental feature of the capitalist market system that over time industries consolidate into monopolies (or groups that act like a monopolies) because that's the best way to maximum profits.
I don't know if gig companies or all VC companies are perfect, but lets not pretend industries regularly fail to innovate in the absence of competition.
Healthcare - the tech disruption in healthcare actually makes it easy to see a doctor over video call for small stuff and easy to track my records over time. The existing healthcare system requires me to call and wait weeks for an appointment and use some clunky UI to even message a doctor. And everyone knows how terrible insurance is..
Banks - In Canada, I can't get a single bank to give me API access to my own account. Their native interfaces suck, and connecting with Mint is frequently buggy. Mint itself is much worse than Quicken for browsing transactions, grouping, charting, but Quicken's API connection to banks sucks, despite also being built by Intuit. Crypto websites and apps are much better & provide great API access. If they had a trustworthy stablecoin, i would move in a heartbeat.
Education - university prices keep going up even as their model remains the same. Even as the actual content of courses is freely available online. University costs are insane, student debt levels are insane. Software is the first industry where the majority of what you need to know especially as you move beyond general CS comes from the internet, _for free_.
Electric cars/space - Reusable rockets were literally considered impossible a decade ago, they are reality now.
Like it would be great to have actual innovation. It would be nice if we had any meaningful anti trust enforcement or other ways to force innovation. But in my (relatively short) lifetime, i have almost never seen large scale innovation happen in the absence of competition. Any serious competition feels like "disruption" to industries accustomed to hanging out and collecting profits.