Reading Sapiens by @harari_yuval. I like it, but came across criticisms of the free market. There are good criticisms to be made, but Yuval's felt a bit basic. For example, he mentions how corporations can cooperate to keep wages low for employees.
Like, sure, but-
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This might make more sense if you have a very limited number of corporations, but then I'd want to see consistency when it comes to expecting how well corporations are able to coordinate
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When I was listening to that book it had the fastest back and forths between "Huh, that's really smart and interesting" and "Hah, that's absurdly basic and dumb!"
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Read what happened at Boeing when it stripped all its talented workers, and outsourced their software development to cheap Indian coders:https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/602188/ …
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Not all corporations need to hire competitively, particularly for unskilled labour (or in certain more broad market conditions).
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Corporations have a lot of internal friction, so they don't need to hire top talent in all roles
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You might like James C Scott (Against the Grain) and Matt Ridley (The Evolution of Everything) better. More grounded in economics.
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I think this assumes that you can hire competitively. Might not work well for less skilled labor categories, where even a much better worker can’t impact the bottom line a substantial amount. So the selfish behavior might not be actually be much of a benefit.
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Also, it does seem to work in the reverse case, where unions band together to demand higher wages/better conditions.
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It's hardly fiction, it happened recently: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2015/01/apple-google-tech-giants-reach-415m-settlement-poaching-suit/amp … environmental efforts don't work like this because the number of collaborators would have to be much higher and much of the payoff would be to future generations rather than to the collaborators.
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Also even relatively competitive industries like airlines have had multi-billion dollar price fixing scandals. "if companies colluded someone could just defect and have a competitive edge" assumes incredibly perfect market dynamics that don't exist in real life.
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