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A comment on Market Concentration Is Threatening the US Economy.

Re:Market Concentration Is Threatening the US Economy by sleepysysadmin on Wednesday March 13, 2019 @11:23AM (#19379569)
The fundamental title and premise of the article is quite inaccurate.

https://tcdata360.worldbank.org/indicators/hh.mkt?country=BR...

Clearly market concentration has been going DOWN worldwide since 1988. It's important to get your basics correct.

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Re:Market Concentration Is Threatening the US Economy by zzzcpan on Wednesday March 13, 2019 @11:31AM (#19379650)
The link you provide uses a different meaning for market concentration, not what the article talks about. You can think of it as market monopolization instead if you don't like the wording.
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Re:Market Concentration Is Threatening the US Economy by dv_dt on Wednesday March 13, 2019 @11:29AM (#19379627)
The linked index is described as "Hirschman Herfindahl index is a measure of the dispersion of trade value across an exporter's partners." Can you expand on how this index relates to market concentration in general, or within a single nation like the US?
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Re:Market Concentration Is Threatening the US Economy by sleepysysadmin on Wednesday March 13, 2019 @12:35PM (#19380380)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herfindahl_index

Named after economists Orris C. Herfindahl and Albert O. Hirschman, it is an economic concept widely applied in competition law, antitrust[1] and also technology management.

The article thoroughly discussed competition and antitrust.

I have not missed the mark on the subject.

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Re:Market Concentration Is Threatening the US Economy by ameister14 on Wednesday March 13, 2019 @12:47PM (#19380569)
Your link is talking about Market concentration in terms of total US imports and exports. It's possible for the HHI to be low in global terms if the US is importing/exporting to a variety of partners even if the production of goods is concentrated in few hands.

So yes, this measure of market concentration has been going down worldwide as globalization increased partnerships between countries, but in this case the HHI index you're referring to isn't measuring microeconomic domestic competition, it's talking about international competition on a macro scale, treating countries as the inputs.

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Re:Market Concentration Is Threatening the US Economy by bwanab on Wednesday March 13, 2019 @12:35PM (#19380387)
At the risk of "appeal to authority", I'm going submit that Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize winner in economics. My guess is that he's got his bases pretty well covered.
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Re:Market Concentration Is Threatening the US Economy by sleepysysadmin on Wednesday March 13, 2019 @01:06PM (#19380848)
He's the Chief Economist of the World Bank... the source of my link. I completely agree with his new-keynesian economics. What I disagree with is his positions on socialism that might work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition

Which hey, machine learning might make this work.

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