I'd like to see that math expanded because I'm not sure I follow. Just because some (even if all) companies want to bleed the world dry, they aren't all colluding. If Tesco put up their prices it's not going to derail my middle class lifestyle, I'll just go shop at lidl instead. If my employer cuts pay in real terms then that's certainly a tougher situation which is why we have a union, but though it may be hassle, middle class people have been known to change jobs.
I'm not alleging collusion, I don't believe there is any active collusion at all. These things are possible through just incentives. E.g. consider a hypothetical streaming providor; compute is cheaper by the year, cost of owning your datacenter goes down by the year, your customer base grows by the year, the amount of money you return on investments like productions continues to pay out by the year, yet your shareholders expect you to raise prices by the year as well despite productivity increasing, customer reach widening, and your costs lowering. Imagine a CEO arguing they don't need to raise prices like the board wants in order to see a bump in the speculative markets on their investments, they'd just sack that CEO for someone who will.
That's just for the hypothetical streaming agency. When you add up all these little increases of just about every good and compare that to wage growth, you see that wages are stagnating relative to other metrics like cost of living or business/national productivity, in the US or the UK or just about anywhere with these sort of metrics available. You can raise minimum wages to fend of a total economic collapse every now and then but these increases find their way to these other hands reaching into your pocket before long as well. A constant sucking noise and a march to what, I'm not sure, but it won't be pretty I expect.
When electric utilities were tightly regulated, utility stocks were rated on the size and consistency of their dividends. PG&E was a great stock to own for a century. The stock price didn't go up fast, but the dividends were paid consistently. That's the steady state of a mature company.
Then came deregulation. Within five years, PG&E went bankrupt.[1]
> Then came deregulation. Within five years, PG&E went bankrupt.[1]
It's not like deregulation was the only issue, that just accelerated the bullshit. PG&E had neglected ("deferred") maintenance for many decades - the deadly 2018 wildfire was caused by a cable hook that was around a century old and had never been inspected for a very VERY long time until it eventually failed [1]. IMHO, that amount of maintenance neglect should have been classified as financial fraud:
> PG&E has said in recent court filings it didn’t track when its hooks were installed or how long they had been exposed to weather. It also didn’t routinely inspect them to look for corrosion or wear. Before the Camp Fire, PG&E inspection forms didn’t even include space to note the condition of hooks and other hardware.
How PG&E dared to pay dividends when they didn't even know how much liabilities they had on the books, that is just utterly insane.
The world is mostly inhabited by people who work for a living but mostly run by people who own things for a living.
These two sources of income (or capital gains -- heaven forbid we tax our rich like we tax our plebs) lead to highly distinct and often directly opposed objective functions. The extent to which this leads to a self-serving policy spiral for the rich is a function of the degree to which the inhabited-by/run-by distinction is true: with a steep enough wealth distribution, yeah, it's fair for people at the bottom to say that people at the top actually are all colluding.
The self-serving policy spiral doesn't look like "Lidl hikes prices and Tesco doesn't, so you can just shop at Tesco," it looks like "merger approved between Lidl and Tesco, now listen to the surviving PR department tell you how this will surely save you money."
Ok so gp was talking about businesses. You are talking about the fact that money is power which is a fundamental problem, though a different one. Not sure how to solve it but stronger controls on political donations and lobbying would help.
