The largest market failure complaint you hear these days is called "enshittification" whereby corporations change their products to be *worse* for end users, but end users don't switch because of monopoly powers and or lock in.
I wonder if this is also a policy decision or if this is one of the cases where you get "better enshittification than not existing at all" type issues.
I definitely think "choice of measurement device" is *the strongest* framing tool anybody has. If you can pick the measurement device that makes you look better you win the argument, a lot of this essay was you picking specific measuring devices and arguing against other measuring devices which is fair but makes me wonder "how can you pick the correct measurements to make arguments about"
I think it can be appropriate for the government to prevent certain cases of significant switching costs on consumers. Lock in is a tricky one, but when there's a clear "you must do 18 steps to cancel" then the government saying "do not do that" seems like a good thing. Generally, a consistent focus on consumer welfare can do a lot of good. Focusing on alleged monopolies does not. Unfortunately, progressives tend to dislike the former and prefer the latter.
Keep in mind that most of my points in this essay rely on taking progressives at their own word of what they hope to achieve and how to achieve it. So, yes, framing and measurement is very important and I've pointed out a few places where I think it's commonly done in a misleading fashion, but like no matter what way you slice it e.g. the U.S. welfare state is primarily aimed at the wealthiest segment of society. No matter how you look at it, the U.S. was not brought out of the Great Depression by the New Deal and did worse than several of its contemporaries. No matter how you look at it, capitalism correlates with prosperity correlates with human wellbeing.
I think part of this is ~policy issues in the sense that consumers don't have very good ways to coordinate against companies, making it easy for companies to (ab)use network effects or setting consumers in prisoner dilemmas against each other.
We've setup so there's individual coordination, some pretty weak boycotting, and then most of the strength is in going through the government to regulate bad behavior by companies.
However, having regulation as a big lever to throw at companies means that there's far less incentive to build useful consumer unions, or for people to work on things like 'sign this contract to not buy Nestle until they do better at X'.
(I admittedly also hold the view that unions would be a lot better if they didn't have much ability to route through the government to entrench their hold)
The largest market failure complaint you hear these days is called "enshittification" whereby corporations change their products to be *worse* for end users, but end users don't switch because of monopoly powers and or lock in.
I wonder if this is also a policy decision or if this is one of the cases where you get "better enshittification than not existing at all" type issues.
I definitely think "choice of measurement device" is *the strongest* framing tool anybody has. If you can pick the measurement device that makes you look better you win the argument, a lot of this essay was you picking specific measuring devices and arguing against other measuring devices which is fair but makes me wonder "how can you pick the correct measurements to make arguments about"
I think it can be appropriate for the government to prevent certain cases of significant switching costs on consumers. Lock in is a tricky one, but when there's a clear "you must do 18 steps to cancel" then the government saying "do not do that" seems like a good thing. Generally, a consistent focus on consumer welfare can do a lot of good. Focusing on alleged monopolies does not. Unfortunately, progressives tend to dislike the former and prefer the latter.
Keep in mind that most of my points in this essay rely on taking progressives at their own word of what they hope to achieve and how to achieve it. So, yes, framing and measurement is very important and I've pointed out a few places where I think it's commonly done in a misleading fashion, but like no matter what way you slice it e.g. the U.S. welfare state is primarily aimed at the wealthiest segment of society. No matter how you look at it, the U.S. was not brought out of the Great Depression by the New Deal and did worse than several of its contemporaries. No matter how you look at it, capitalism correlates with prosperity correlates with human wellbeing.
I think part of this is ~policy issues in the sense that consumers don't have very good ways to coordinate against companies, making it easy for companies to (ab)use network effects or setting consumers in prisoner dilemmas against each other.
We've setup so there's individual coordination, some pretty weak boycotting, and then most of the strength is in going through the government to regulate bad behavior by companies.
However, having regulation as a big lever to throw at companies means that there's far less incentive to build useful consumer unions, or for people to work on things like 'sign this contract to not buy Nestle until they do better at X'.
(I admittedly also hold the view that unions would be a lot better if they didn't have much ability to route through the government to entrench their hold)
lol