I'm not sure that's true. The more business Amazon hoovers up the less business is available to go around for others.
but that doesn't mean that amazon's input is zero sum. it's certainly true that they've displaced businesses & industries, but that's simply a case of consumer dollars following a new model that they think is an improvement over the prior ones. cars displaced horses. that doesn't mean cars were zero sum. just the opposite, they improved people's lives in all sorts of ways - creative destruction.
and it's a fact that the world is not zero sum. if it was zero sum, we'd all be as poor as we were a thousand years ago collectively, but instead we're much, much richer.
Really ? Amazon bought up IMDb and then promptly shut down its message boards which was an act of cultural vandalism in my book. Also the method they used to compress their MP3 music should be a scandal. They should pay people to download that crap not the other way around. And I don't think their workers are all that impressed by Amazon's "innovations". As for Google don't get me started on their skewed search results as they chase the mega advertising dollars.
some fair points, but my response would be: the real world is messy, and innovation isn't always clear in its gains, and there can be losses. i bet mp3s are worse in sound quality, there's likely little question on that. but apparently that doesn't matter to people, because they seem to be happy to trade the better sound quality for the convenience of beaming electrons instead of having 100s of pieces of plastic cluttering up their houses.
in fact, this leads to one of the greatest stories that everyone should be talking about, but almost no one seems to know: the decoupling of economic growth from material consumption. we are actually using less stuff even as we grow more wealthy, and the ability to consume things by having them beamed to your phone or roku or laptop is a huge part of that.
i'd really recommend andrew mcafee's book 'more from less.' it's chock full of details on this incredible revolution. if you don't want to read his book, i really recommend his interview on the podcast 'econtalk.' it's bursting with fun, interesting insights on what's happened in the past few decades.
https://www.econtalk.org/andrew-mcafee-on-more-from-less/
so you may not like that lots of people are listening to relatively lo-fi music, but 1) you still, as a consumer in a free market, have the option of buying an lp or a cd in almost all cases because companies will try to satisfy even small niche consumers, and 2) what would the alternative be if we didn't have those electrons providing us with our music and tv and movies? if we didn't have that, then we'd all be buying lots more plastic and playing those.
consider the way so many products have collapsed into our phones and laptops - all kinds of gizmos, clocks and radios and stereos and cameras and compasses and barometers. and stuff we never had before - gps, for example. and not only the fact that we can carry around all those things on one device. consider the energy saved. lots of devices like your clock radio are weirdly energy hungry, and having that displaced by your phone is indeed a net good. it's bad for clock radio manufacturers. they lose. but their loss is a net gain, a gain for consumers who get more for less, a gain for the world that gets more information, more value with less material consumption.
Excuse me, are we living on the same planet ? Do you mean pursuing the interest of buying a huge range of disposable cheap crap from China, is that what you mean ?
among many other things, i absolutely would include that. and there are huge issues with china of course. but that stuff that you dismiss as cheap crap is something someone wants to buy.
and rather than falling down a hole of telling people what they should or shouldn't buy, i would ask you to look at chinese poverty in the last 30 years. in 1990 66% of chinese people lived in extreme poverty - less than $1.90 per day. they had nothing. they scraped by a truly meager existence, inadequate calories, awful housing conditions, all the things you associate with absolute poverty.
in 2015, 0.70% of chinese lived in absolutely poverty. absolute poverty in china is on the verge of extinction.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-the-population-living-in-extreme-poverty?tab=chart&time=1990..2015&country=~CHN
those are people whose lives are better. people are in many cases alive who, if china hadn't opened their economy and instituted free market reforms and traded, they wouldn't be.
so if you care about people, and i'm sure we all do, it should really matter that 100s of millions of people have escaped from horrible, horrible lives due to people freely selling and buying cheap junk.
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4 years ago
and consider the consumer who buys that stuff. it may not mean much to some, but for lower class americans and canadians, the option to buy more things at a lower price is an incredible blessing. it saves them money. it allows them to buy things for their kids that they wouldn't have had otherwise. that is a gain for them, for their children. it allows them to save in ways they couldn't, take their kids on a vacation, save for their education. that is a net dollar value for them, for the world, and it as a moral good for us.
if capitalism doesn't do those things, then my challenge to anyone would be to point me to a place that has removed it and subsequently improved the conditions for their residents. i don't think there is such a place, and until we find an alternative way, there is no system shown to improve the lives of all people that can compare to the innovations and improvements that result from economic freedom, from billions of people individually pursuing their own interests.
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